Gods That Are Looked At (Part 3)

This is the third part of a multi-part creative nonfiction piece. Here are the first and second parts.

March 3, 1887. Tuscumbia, Alabama. Six-year-old Helen Keller meets the teacher that will bring her out of darkness into light by introducing her to language.

Little Helen lives in a world of smell, taste, touch, deprived of sight and sound by an illness at age nineteen months.

Helen remembers the home of her childhood before the sickness, the small two-room house that looks like an arbor from the garden. The house is covered with vines, climbing roses, and honeysuckle. The little porch is cloaked in a screen of yellow roses and Southern smilex. Bees and hummingbirds hover and hum.

She remembers the scents and textures of the house and garden after going blind and deaf: the perfume of the violets and lilies, the cool of leaves and grass as she buries her face in them, the soft touch of blossoms on the tumble-down vines covering the summer-house at the far end of the garden. The fragrance of dew-washed flowers mists the air, rising from the garden of roses, butterfly lilies, trailing clematis, and drooping jessamine.

But even the vast tactile landscape and deluge of olfactory sensation feels clouded with a thick emotional black.

Helen feels many things.

Jealousy–when her sister is born and Helen is no longer her mother’s sole darling.

Glee–when she locks her mother in a room and feels the vibrations of her banging and pounding on the door for three hours.

Terror–when her dress catches fire and burns her hands before the nurse can rescue her.

Impatience–when she cannot understand the meaning of the letters that she feels her teacher, Miss Sullivan, tracing onto her open palms with the tip of a finger.

Frustration–Helen smashes a doll to the ground.

Satisfied delight–when she feels the fragments of the broken doll at her feet.

But she feels no sorrow or regret at the outburst. In the still, dark world in which I lived there was no strong sentiment or tenderness.

Little Helen feels, at times, something akin to regret. After the tantrums, kicking and screaming wildly at her nurse, Ella, Helen knows that she has hurt her. But the feeling never sticks long enough to keep her from lashing out again when she doesn’t get what she wants.

Empathy escapes little Helen, but she is on the verge of revelation, on the brink of generativity.

She communicates basic desires with gestures, but lacks the building blocks of complex language to organize her sensations and develop a cognitive world that recognizes its cooperation with other conscious beings.

There aren’t two worlds, but to Helen there are: the interior world of her immediate sensations and the silent, dark, exterior where everyone else lives, a world she doesn’t know. Her world lacks the strong, animal sense of time cognized by the human brain, and the flowering of cultivated memory, the ability to link one event or sensation to others.

Helen is conscious, waking, but has only a dim sense of her relationship to other waking things.

Miss Sullivan brings Helen her hat, a signal: they are going outside into the warm sunshine. Helen hops and skips with pleasure.

The teacher and student walk down to the well-house, drawn by honeysuckle scent. The teacher sees the water spout in the well-house and decides to try again. She has tried before to teach Helen the naming of things, tracing letters into her palms and giving her the corresponding object: “d-o-l-l” paired with the pre-shattered doll. She’s tried to teach her “m-u-g” and “w-a-t-e-r” that day already, but Helen keeps conflating the two.

But here they come again to the water, to that cool, strong god, tamed and coursing from a spigit. The teacher grabs one of Helen’s hands and pulls it beneath the spout gushing with cool deity. Into her other hand, she spells “w-a-t-e-r.” Slow at first, then rapidly.

Helen stands still, attention fixed on the motion of her teacher’s fingers.

Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten–a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!

The water had the look of water that is looked at.

Thus I came out of Egypt and stood before Sinai, a power divine touched my spirit and gave it sight, so that I beheld many wonders. And from that sacred mountain I heard a voice which said, “Knowledge is love and light is vision.”

The girl had the look of a girl that looks.

Gods That Are Looked At (Part 2)

This is part of a larger piece of creative nonfiction. The beginning can be found here.

The ancient Egyptians look at Hapi, god of the Nile, a deity whose false beard reaches just to the tops of his female breasts. A cloth covers the loins that (we might guess) are turquoise like the rest of his skin. Hapi’s stomach is rounded as if stuffed with the fat of the land he has nourished.

When Hapi is god of the northern part of the Nile, he wears papyrus plants and his wife is Buto. When Hapi is god of the southern region of the river, his wife is Nekhebet and he wears lotus on his head. He oversees the water that floods the Nile, depositing the silt on the bank that makes the crops grow.

Hapi is a very old god, maker of the universe, creator of the earth. Over time, Hapi disappears into Osiris, god of the dead, god of earth, god of vegetation.

The droughts are Osiris’ death, and the flooding are his rebirth.

The sacred stories say Osiris is murdered by his brother, Set, who tricks him into trying out a fine sarcophagus that Set then casts into the Nile. Osiris’ wife, Isis, searches for the god’s corpse and finds it. She goes out to gather herbs and potions to bring Osiris back to life, but Set discovers the body, tears it into fourteen pieces, and flings it across Egypt. Isis finds and gives her husband a proper burial, but first she revives him (and his fish-eaten penis) long enough to copulate and conceive a son.

Osiris becomes king of the afterlife. When the Nile swells and floods, it is Osiris born again. When the Nile recedes, Egypt mourns Osiris’ loss and gives gifts on the shore. When it floods, the priests pour sweet water into the Nile and proclaim Osiris found.

But these are only two (or one?) gods.

There is Anuket, goddess of the Nile, decked in a headdress of reeds and ostrich feathers. Her sacred animal is the gazelle.

Nephthys, goddess of death, vegetation, and rivers. Her headdress is a house and a basket. She is the inversion of her sister, Isis–Nephthys is death and Isis is rebirth.

Khnum, god of creation and waters, source of the Nile, and the god that creates the bodies of children on his potter’s wheel from the Nile’s clay and places them in their mothers’ wombs.

Sobek, god with the head of a crocodile, god of the Nile, the army, military, and fertility.

Tefnut, goddess of moisture, air, dew, rain, weather, fertility.

I name only a few.

*

The Canaanites look at Yam (Sea), whose epithet is Judge Nahar, Judge River. Yam’s greatest rival is also a god of water: Baal Haddad, god of the storm, thunder, lightning, rain, fertility.

Baal Haddad rides on the clouds, clutching bolts of lightning in his fists. When Baal descends to the underworld, it leaves the summers dry. When he returns in autumn, storms revive the barren land.

Egypt and Mesopotamia hold fast to their river gods. Their agriculture depends on irrigation from these water sources. But here in Canaan, the life source for crops is rain. The stormgod must be kept close.

Baal Haddad conquers the serpent Yam. He strikes Yam’s skull and rends him in pieces.

Gods That Are Looked At

Gods That Are Looked At

Some may imagine that there are two worlds, one “out there” and a separate one being cognized inside the skull. But the “two worlds” model is a myth. Nothing is perceived except perceptions themselves, and nothing exists outside of consciousness. Only visual reality is extant, and there it is. Right there.

–Robert Lanza, Biocentrism, 36

And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses / Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

–T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton”

*

I sit on a wide slab of broken concrete that veers down into the stream.

“What’s that?” my redheaded three-year-old, Marshall, points a dirt-caked fingernail toward another piece of concrete that juts up from the middle of the stream, submerged except for its tip, water frothing at its seams.

Trees along the bank stretch upward and lean over us, and tangles of brush thicken the water’s edge. On the other side of the stream rises a hill of dry grass under a soft blue sky. At our backs, the beaten path lies in a small stretch of forest, a preserved nature trail that I might forget is a trail if not for these masses of concrete.

But I know this is no wilderness. We’re still in suburbia, our apartment door a scant half-mile away. The entrance to the trail stands at an asphalt road not more than a hundred yards.

Marshall sits beside me in his knitted cap and Paddington Bear coat, his bright blue mittens wrapped around a navy plastic cup long-emptied of the stove-stewed cocoa. Honey, milk, cocoa powder, chocolate chips–all slurped down two minutes into our expedition.

I sip homemade coffee from a ceramic to-go cup and listen to the brown water of the Wissahickon rush by. “Just more concrete,” I answer.

We are a silent pair of old men fishing by a creek, lazing like the Saturday it is.

A Cooper’s Hawk soars in circles over the trees and high above the hill. “Look,” I point upward to the patch of blue sky. “Did you see the bird?” I ask Marshall. “She’s in the trees now, but look–she’s circling back around. Can you see her?”

“Yeah,” he says, “I do.”

The hawk flies away and we resume our placid river-gazing.

I think the river is a strong brown god–sullen, untamed and intractable, patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier.

I look at the thread of thin mud dribbling by our feet. No strong god this.

And yet this stream feels like a muted, but substantive, glory to me–a wonder for a suburbanite living just a short train ride from Philadelphia. I can see in this small trickle of water how a river could become a god where a river god is needed, in another age or region of the world that relies on the river for agricultural flourishing.

But here it’s little more than a problem confronting the builder of bridges. The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten by the dwellers in cities.

I am not a city-dweller, but we have our own strange gods in the American suburbs, gods by other names, gods that order our days for better and for worse. Gods of light and energy that determine when we rise and sleep. Transportation gods that ordain where we go and how we get there. Gods of urban planning and architecture that stratify our towns and decide what gets built where. Socio-economic gods enshrined in our legal system and upheld by our white supremacist myths, gods that determine who makes how much and where they live. Gods that reflect how they are looked at.

Often, gods start to bleed together. They dazzle our eyes and flow in and out of one another like eddies on a river.

Here in the suburbs, there is little reverence of the river or honor for the storm. Rain and river neither sustain or disturb us, so we pay them little heed until we feel the weather gods lashing out because of our neglect and abuse.

As I write this, hurricane Irma rips through Florida. Already it has torn through the Caribbean, passed north of Puerto Rico and surged through northern Cuba. Last week, hurricane Harvey devastated southeastern Texas.

Floods, storms, droughts, earthquakes–natural disasters have been around since time immemorial and have been pinned on gods for just as long. Drought means a storm god is missing. Flood and storm are the work of a miffed deity.

But that was in the old days, in the polytheistic imagination. In spite of the proliferation of gods, the West insists we have just one (or zero, depending on who you ask). When the U.S. experiences a natural disaster, there’s always a pastor or two on hand to say that this one God is punishing us for legalizing gay marriage. It is not the weather gods angry at us for making the earth hotter, gods roiling at our exacerbation of the planet. No, the one God sends a hurricane as the “due penalty of our error,” the error of letting people marry whom they choose.

But I’ll waste no more time on the impious, the frauds that don’t respect their own visions. They don’t take responsibility for the beings that rise and dance in response to their gaze. I want to live in the company of people who are mindful of the gods within our purview.

As I sit on the creek bank next to my son, the child of my body–my self disseminated, de-centered–I feel only wonder.

Everything is full of gods.

I don’t know what Thales meant by this statement or, for the life of me, why I always remember it wrong. It sticks in my mind as The air is thick with gods. A fog, a sense of density, an everything. The universe is an ocean, gods are its water. No matter where you turn, lo and behold! A god. There it is. Look! A god that is looked at.

I turn my head to look at Marshall staring at the water. “Are you ready to walk back now?” I ask.

“No,” he says, not turning his eyes. “Let’s stay.”

This, here, is the miracle of consciousness: to be confronted with the indissoluble. Everything is full of gods, the universe swirling with infinite potentials, thick with what could be if we would only stop and perceive. A world where there are no ‘false’ gods. All the gods perceived are perceptions. All roses have the look of flowers that are looked at. Nothing exists apart from consciousness. Of all the gods and flowers that might be cognized, these are the ones that capture our gaze (or are captured, framed, by our gaze).

In a universe of possibilities, uncountable abstractions that could become concrete, this right here is the actual I see.

I am at this juncture of the Wissahickon, looked over by these particular trees. I drink the coffee in my hand, the cup crafted from hot water and two thimblefuls of beans from Ethiopia, the coffee I will never drink again even if I make a similar-tasting cup from the same batch of beans. I sit beside a small human who might have been, or been very different than he is now, a conscious body that is changing day by day.

As the slight brown god flows by under our watch, all the gods dissolve into its current.

They Call It Love. And Maybe It Is.

No Dating to Kiss goodbye

My parents didn't forbid me from dating as a teenager, but my pool of eligible young men was restricted to church and my homeschool group. And thanks to a book written by a twenty-one year old homeschooled kid about the foibles of dating, we were all about courtship. Terms like "boyfriend," "girlfriend," and "dating" were dirty words.

There were a few good humored, sensible young men in my homeschool group that were very easy on the eyes. But although hope sprung eternal, I think I knew deep down that it was fruitless to imagine that any of them would solicit my father's permission to come over once a week to sit stiffly in our parlor to pay me court.

But I imagined anyway. I was pretty sure it would look something like this (sans the dancing, but definitely including the hamster):

It wasn't until my last semester in college that I fell in love for the first time. Throughout college, I'd always had a thing for one gent or another, but this was the first time I'd experienced anything mutual.

Though I had yet to experience reciprocal inloveness, I wrote about love constantly in high school and in those early college days. It amazes me how frequently and authoritatively I wrote about romantic love before I had ever had the experience of being in love. As I sorted through my paper files this weekend, I came across this fragment of writing from about ten years ago that I think I meant to work into a love story:

These few paragraphs say so much about how I understood love and inloveness in my early college days. They drip with a hope in the magic of inloveness, but also the impulse to kill that hope in magic before it exposed me for a fool.

I've been in love for over seven years now, and I can't speak with authority on some kind of universal experience of inloveness, I can say something provisional about the potentials of romantic love. Or at least do better than viewing all inloveness as parasitic by default.

The Dazzle of Real Fantasies

Those early stages of dazzle are not unreal or (necessarily) unhealthy phantasms, the bubbles that will be burst once we get down to the daily nitty-gritty of "real love." I think that's actually a very suspicious disposition toward love. Rather, sometimes our deepest and most emotionally raw realities are fantasies of the loveliest kind, real fictions to be nurtured and elaborated on. 

Our experience of what people might think of as the "highs" of inloveness are (or at least can be) co-authored realities that produce a heightened sense of mutual awareness (the "us" factor). They are not the fake stuff that we must beat back to get to the real stuff of love, but the beginnings of a delightfully fabricated reality of life together that we must continue to fashion anew.

Likewise, "the daily grind" of ordinary life is not the foil to these concentrated moments of awareness of being in love, but the necessary food of a relationship that is contingent and changing. I'll dare to contradict Shakespeare and say that love isn't ever-fixed mark, but a perpetual movement. And I'll affirm (contra Hartley Coleridge) that love is a fancy and a feeling, not "immortal as immaculate Truth" unless we own that immortality is contingent upon perpetual transformation and "truth" is anything but spotless. The surest way to kill love is to expect it to be always the same, and it's from this expectation of sameness that we get the inloveness/daily grind dichotomy.

My pre-inloveness writings have a common theme: a roiling hope in the realities of deep connection, and also an abject fear that such love would never materialize (and, further, that if it didn't it would be my fault for failing to engage the "really real"). What I missed (among many things) was the concept of creation and cultivation. Love isn't a matter of "real" vs. "fake," but of creating an awareness of the environs in which love grows and learning how best to tend and nourish.

Magic sweeps in, washes over and into us. It's the spell of the tide that flows over us and ebbs back into the dark sea, the undertow tugging us into its uncertain deeps. Don't be afraid of its unfathomed worlds or the strength of its grip. In time, the sea will cast you up again onto dry land. You will trace the sand with your finger, the wet sand that (scientifically speaking) did not exist until you perceived it.

You will touch the solid, shifting earth and wonder which was real: the magic of the sea or the rootedness of dirt? And you will be answered by the crash of waves and the sensation of particles moving beneath your hand.

Food, Sex, and Grammar: Why 'Biblical Manhood and Womanhood' Aren't Biblical Enough

The analysis of the act of eating may be considered similar to a grammatical analysis. A meal is as complex as a sentence or a paragraph: it is constituted by smaller individual elements, words, that are the essential ingredients which have on their own a peculiar provenance and that carry one or more tastes. These basic elements can be taken singularly, of course, but they are enhanced, and give much more sense, when they are mixed in a potentially unlimited number of ways--and each time they acquire a whole new meaning. In fact, setting up a meal is never just an answer to a physical necessity, but it serves very specific and different purposes of communication. Food conveys meanings, in much the same way as a text, and in the same manner it might thus be read and understood, once the language it speaks is known. Furthermore, the metaphor of a grammar analysis is also useful to recall the sense of rules, of a grid in which each element must find its place: in order for the whole system to work properly, each constituent must follow some accepted and renowned paradigms. Thus, the relationships among words, sentences or paragraphs are rigorous and dynamic at the same time.

- Stefania Ermidoro, Commensality and Ceremonial Meals in the Neo-Assyrian Period (pp. 13-14)

I love this comparison of meals to grammar, not just because I adore words and food, but because I think of everything as communication. Each element of the universe, humans included, is constantly moving as part of a web of relationships, perpetually turning into a new meaning.

My deepening understanding of language is (I think) what led me away from a belief in fixed gender roles and from my narrow view of what could constitute healthy sexual identity and praxis.

If I had time and energy, I could guide you through my long journey as a biblical exegete through the deep and murky waters of hermeneutics, historical criticism, linguistic analysis, and the many ways that interpreters have approached the Bible to understand its significance for contemporary life. But when it comes down to it, my changing view of language, of reality, is what changed my approach to gender and sexuality (and continues to change it). 

The categories I grew up with (very similar to the rigid binaries expressed by the CBMW in the Nashville Statement--let the record show that I was a big CBMW fan as a teen!) just didn't cohere with the complexity and plurality of experiences and perspectives I saw both in the text of Bible and the book of the world. When I say the CBMW isn't "biblical enough," what I mean by extension is that it isn't linguistic enough: it doesn't fit with the elasticity of language or even the Bible as a plurality of dynamic linguistic creations.

People as ingredients

People are sentences made up of the words of their experience, and together we make paragraphs and essays and books that are potentially endless. We are the ingredients of a meal that can be combined in many different ways to create endlessly delightful dishes that can be assembled in a variety of different ways to comprise a banquet.

It's typical for traditionalists of the CBMW variety to express a fear that society and culture (and likewise the church) will lose its structure or verge on moral collapse if people depart from what they see as God's design for human sexuality as expressed in the Bible. I see hermeneutical issues with this argument, but beyond these debates is a related problem: it does not cohere with the simple witness of language itself. 

As Ermidoro expresses above, language is both rigorous and dynamic. Its evolution and dynamism doesn't mean it lacks structure or order, but that the structures are provisional and flexible. In this sense, there is no end to what we can create through the combination of different ingredients (or, if there is an end, it's not within our purview).

To accept a spectrum of experience (whether in regard to sexuality, gender, or anything else) isn't a departure from order, but an acknowledgement that at various times and places, societies have put limits on the types of words/ingredients/people that could comprise their ordered social "meal" (for a variety of reasons), and that these limits are provisional boundaries, not ideals for all human societies of all times and places to emulate. In fact, in many cases the limitations are not only arbitrary, but oppressive, unjust, and rooted in hatred or fear of difference (an easy example is the ban on interracial marriage in the U.S. that persisted until 1967, and the false racialized narratives that still persist in American consciousness).

All cultures and societies create limits for a variety of different reasons. Limits are not inherently bad (in fact, they are necessary and implicit in any structure). And sometimes people purposefully impose limits on themselves or their communities in order to open up other opportunities. For example, some people may choose never to marry and/or be celibate because they want to devote themselves to other things (be it the church or a career or another cause). Or, if you have an extreme peanut allergy, you would probably want to avoid peanuts (but that doesn't mean peanuts are deadly to everyone).

These are limits that are helpful for some, and not for others. The problem comes when provisional structures become ossified and divorced from other components of the structure (which is in constant flux).

I would venture to say that the most consistent argument advanced by Christians in support of complementarianism as God's ideal (and against any sexual experience outside of marriage between one cisgender man and one cisgender woman) is that God has given us a recipe book for the human sexuality. This recipe is thought to be derived from the Bible and/or Church tradition, and is advanced as the perfect guide to get the chemistry just right to create the perfect culinary masterpiece!

But the proof is in the pudding. 

the pudding

And as we've learned through the witness of those who can't be squeezed into the cisgender heterosexual category, there is a lot more diversity of "ingredients" than the dominant culture wants to acknowledge and accept. To argue that 1 cisgender man + 1 cisgender woman is the only proper way to make a marriage, you have to argue either that 1) other ways of combining ingredients is bad or 2) that the ingredients are actually bad.  

If we're going to talk about "bad ingredients," we'd have to debate what constitutes "bad." Remember that so much culinary delight and nourishment has come from rotten stuff. Is it moldy milk or is it cheese? Sour cream anyone? I don't enjoy soured milk on my cereal, but it's great for baking a chocolate cake or making pancakes! Beer? Wine? And isn't honey made of bee spit (or something like that)? 

I'm not even sure we need to apply the analogy to humans since it's plain as day to anyone who actually has a friendship with any LGBTQIA person that there's nothing inherently bad about them anymore than there is anything inherently bad about a heterosexual cisgender woman like me. We all commit relational transgressions, and are in need of growth and maturity and working through our issues, but that's different from saying someone's a bad apple. That's the kind of thinking that gives rise to eugenics and gay conversion therapy.

So to argue for "traditional marriage" as the only morally acceptable option, you'd have to go back to the combination argument: that what we've got through Church tradition is the right ratios for human sexuality.

Now of course in baking and cooking, the chemistry is important, but as I've noted above, it's a relational (and often experimental) process. We make provisional judgments (for better and for worse) all the time about what makes a good combo ("Julie and John aren't well-matched, they should never have married!"). 

But unless we discover solid evidence for why certain ingredients shouldn't be arrange in a particular way, we'd have no reason to keep them from doing so. In fact, when we keep ingredients apart arbitrarily, we deny their right to find their place in the feast of meaning, which ends up depriving everyone and limiting the scope of our communal palate. (And in the case of Julie and John--they're already together, so it's likely that our unsolicited thoughts about whether or not they make a good cake isn't helping them, but only reinforcing our opinion of what we think tastes good.)

As anyone who has baked or cooked or exercised hospitality knows, recipes and the order of a meal are very flexible and subjective, and there is also the element of taste. Serve a chocolate walnut pudding to ten people and eight of them might think it's delicious, but the other two guests (unbeknownst to you) don't care for it at all (one doesn't like chocolate and the other as an allergy). It may indeed be a lovely pudding--but it's not for everyone.

(Sure, if there's arsenic in the cake, probably everyone will die, but since I've born witness to a number of lovely lesbian marriages that as yet have not poisoned me or anyone else, I'd venture to say that the "bad apple" argument applied to LGBTQIA people still doesn't work.)

culinary combinations

Say you want to make a cake. The basic ingredients are the same as any other pastry: flour, sugar, dairy, salt, and a raising agent (unless you're making a gluten or dairy-free pastry). But the order in which you mix these things together and the ratio and a host of other things will change based on what you are trying to create. You say you need butter. Butter is butter (let's call a spade a spade!). But it's also dairy, but then so is milk. You need two dairies. Unless you want to make a sour cream cake, and sour cream is also dairy, a third type of the (allegedly) same thing. Well, they all come from a cow, don't they? Unless they come from a goat or another animal. Is it still butter or is it goat's butter and goat's milk?

We can endlessly categorize these things (and do), and many of these categories even have a basis in biological makeup (e.g.,butter, milk, and sour cream that all come from the same cow). But the fact that they can be become a plethora of different things and be defined in a variety of different ways points to their vast potential to create an excess of meaning, and it's certainly no argument for putting a cap on what they can mean.

Flour? Okay. What kind? Pick one, portion it out, get the ratios right--but of course they're ratios, relational. How much flour you add will depend on how much butter and sugar you put in. And of course the heat of the oven and the time it takes to bake will all need to be gauged in relation to the other elements, like the shape of the cake pan. And is it a sheet cake or a cupcake? Or, wait, is the cupcake a muffin? Or is the cake a fruit bread? Or is shortbread actually a cookie?

And you don't even want to know how my husband and I disagree on what makes a scone a scone and a biscuit a biscuit.

My point is that our very reality is predicated on the dynamism of structures that shift and evolve. This isn't an ideal we try to conform to--this is the way we function as language. Denying our mutability and our potential to become new meaning may feel more secure or coherent for a time, but it's counter-productive, uncreative, and perpetuates injustice.

Plus, it's boring.

So to those who have so often been pushed outside of the conversation, denied a place at the table: know that you are language and you are lovely.

You may be an uncommon word. Perhaps even a hapax legomenon, a word that only occurs once in a single body of literature, a word whose meaning is difficult to understand because it is so rarely heard. But you belong here. You belong here because you are here, and your presence opens up the universe to an excess of meaning.

When "God's Design" is Code for "You Threaten Me"

I've spent over fifteen years (over half my life) thinking about gender and sexuality from various angles ("biblical" and otherwise), and I have yet to encounter a world in which "God's design" isn't just code for "your difference threatens me."

People have the right to work out their sexual identity in safe spaces. Pious, universal declarations about "what God intends" for human sexuality will not help the church, but fuel fear and create further space for social stigma and legal oppression of those who don't fit within the heteronormative framework of the dominant culture.

Believe me, as someone who has lived in such Christian spaces for many years, I understand the good intentions of those who make such declarations about "biblical manhood and womanhood." But if there's one thing I've discovered over the past three years that has devastated me to my core, it's that people can be kind, caring, well-intentioned, and generally decent people, and still perpetuate massive injustice.

Sometimes I tremble when I look back on the ways my lack of perspective has reinforced and perpetuated injustice, and fear that I am still perpetuating injustice because I am unable to experience the world from someone else's center.

But I refuse to acknowledge that a blue pill existence is a necessary or permanent state of things.

Whatever you believe, whatever your convictions or story, you cannot rely on what you have always known because what you know has been experienced from your own center. And that experience from your center has been joined to the experiences of people who look and sound like you.

These people are actually different from you, but through repetition you've created the comfortable illusion of sameness. Together you have eaten meals and forged new memories and created a communal core experience by collapsing the individual perspectives into a monolith to eliminate the terror of difference.

But then someone different comes along--or, rather, someone whose difference you feel more acutely because it doesn't fit into the illusion of sameness you've created. And it frightens you of course because you've learned that all things are best experienced from your center or your community's illusory center. In your design for the world, you are the core, the stillpoint of the turning world. And that must be preserved at all costs.

But there is an alternative to this perspective. A disposition (both individual and communal) that says, "I cannot experience consciousness from your center. You must tell me your story, and in the telling I will learn to know your existence and not to fear it."

The power you think belongs to you will be scattered, dispersed, redistributed. You will not see from every center, but you will live in the joy of knowing that every center matters, that your body is not diminished by the presence of another body. You will love that body as you love your own.

You will love, but you will not be free. For in letting go of your need for your center to be the center, you will find a new terror.

You will find yourself spread out through the cosmos, bound in relation to all things. You will find that your body was never in danger from difference, but from the illusion of sameness. And you will find that in loving your neighbor's body, you have loved yourself.

You will find no escape from the world you so desperately love, no relief from the weight of relation. You will radiate from every center, and every center will radiate from you.

No Way Out But Through: My Son's Birth

My doula later told me that my perineal tears were pretty bad, but I hadn't even felt the nurse's needle stitching me up.

My whole body was traumatized and still hurting, but it was nothing compared to the contractions and pains of pushing for hours. Were it not for the sight of the nurse leaning into my spread legs with the concentration of an exacting embroiderer, I might not have noticed at all.

The relief was proportional to the intensity of the pain, and I felt the world opening to me, as though my skin, eyes, and olfactory nerves were waking to new colors and sensations that my terrified body had been too cowed to meet during the labor. 

I remember when I first felt the wakening. 

They say I pushed for about two hours, but I couldn't believe it. No, it couldn't have been more than twenty or thirty minutes. How had I stayed in that intensity, pushed in that exhaustion, leaned into that pain without a sense of when it would end?

But it did end. When you feel the pain intensify, they tell you, don't back away. Push. Lean in. Even as your body wants to retreat, it wants to advance, and when it's most frightened, it wants to be brave.

The fear. That was the most surprising thing. People talk (too much) about the pain of childbirth. But I didn't know that I would be afraid, that I would reach a place where I didn't know if I could go on, didn't know if I was strong enough.

But I knew I had to go on, that my body was proceeding whether I liked it or not. I didn't have a choice. This baby was coming out one way or another. The option of quitting was not open to me. I was powerless to back away from my body. The only way out was to go through.

The baby is crowning, they say, almost there.

How long between crowning and birth? I can't remember. Minutes? Seconds? Years?

The ebbed pain rushes through me again and again: rising, peaking, falling, rising, peaking.

Falling, rushing, rising, until the climax that I do not know is the final climax until the falling action.

Then a slippery bundle of tiny head, arms, and legs shoots (yes, shoots) out between my legs. I see the baby plop squirming into the open hands of Josh and the midwife. I see Josh crying, astounded. I feel the world rushing in as the intensity rushes out.

A team of nurses whisks the baby away to deal with the meconium, but minutes (seconds?) later the baby is in my arms, my breast is being shoved into the baby's mouth, and someone is giving me the stitches.

It feels like a joke, really. I was so afraid of tearing, of having to be sewn up. Afraid of falling apart. Afraid of remembering that I am a body, an organic composite of infinitely divisible parts working together, moving, changing.

Afraid of being exposed. I laugh at how, in the beginning I am determined to labor with as much skin covered as possible, and by the end I am a mess of exposed body, seen by a host of ministering angels who catch my vomit in a pan, put ice in my mouth, and bear away my shit.

Yes, a joke. All of it a joke. To think that I am afraid of being torn.

Liquid Silver

whittle your images

and splinter them with an ax,

bash them with a hammer.

cut your stones, build your city,

and demolish its walls.

shred the photo from 1992.

*

i am a broken god,

a ruined city,

bits of curled matte

in the office recycle bin.

holy hell, my skin, 

the only holy hell.

*

your fixed gaze on my

unfixed, hallowing body.

your smoldering eye

turns me to liquid silver.

*

you see my many bodies,

but do not desire

ever-hardened faces.

i am new, and still

you recognize me.

you hold my plastic form

in your ever-softening gaze.

Letter to My Future Husband (#2): Darling, Precious, Light of My Life!

Inspired by Brio Magazine to write letters to my future husband, I wrote nearly 150 letters during my adolescent years (sealed with wax and tied with ribbons). I wrote the first letter a month after turning 15. The letters to this imaginary person are embarrassing and ridiculous and beautiful (but mostly ridiculous). I've decided to start sharing them. My commentary is italicized and set in brackets.

Letter #2: July 28,  2002

Dearest darling, precious, light of my life, essence of all I hold dear,

Today we went to Dad's co-worker's house. They had two boys, one 13, the other 14 1/2, only 1/2 a year younger than myself. They proceeded to give all four of us the most unpleasant time they could. I will not go into particulars [oh, please, do!], but when we left, everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

I sometimes think that those persons less mature than ourselves are meant to test our endurance, and our ability to love those around us [I'm pretty this is an adaptation of Mary Bennett's pious declaration: "Misfortunes, we are told, are sent to test our fortitude..."] .

And so I sat there and made myself love those boys. [Concentrate, Rebekah. You can do this. Think love love love.] I got a chance to share my faith because they asked how I could be Jewish and a believer in Jesus.

Dearest one, though this letter is not filled with many odes of love--more advice [wait...what advice?]--I love you more than I can say.

Love always,

Rebekah

There they are again: those motifs of "love as willpower" and "God's desire against mine." I don't deny that love can be difficult or take willpower and concentration, but the more I look at the writings of my formative years, I see a fundamental belief that love by definition must be hard and that my will would always be set against God's. Why such an adversarial understanding of my relationship to God and the world? 

This view of love was undermined by the arrival of my actual future husband. It was (and continues to be) the easiest relationship I'd ever stumbled into, more like tending a garden than beating back my intransigent will.

I am glad I had a sense that I should love my neighbors (even these annoying boys), but the idea of loving someone for someone else's sake (i.e., for Jesus) feels foreign to me now. Why should this be a trial to test my maturity? Why shouldn't it just grow my maturity, expand my world to include these boys that make me uncomfortable?

Why shouldn't I simply be caught up in relation, responding to these boys generously because I do not want to be a person whose face is turned perpetually away from those who hurt or annoy me? Why shouldn't I be able to cultivate the desire to turn toward other people for nourishment as a plant turns toward the sun?

Letters to My Future Husband (#1): Thanks, Brio!

Inspired by Brio Magazine to write letters to my future husband, I wrote nearly 150 letters during my adolescent years (sealed with wax and tied with ribbons). I wrote the first letter a month after turning 15. The letters to this imaginary person are embarrassing and ridiculous and beautiful (but mostly ridiculous). I've decided to start sharing them. My commentary is italicized and set in brackets.

Letter #1: July 27,  2002

My dearest husband [how many husbands did I expect to have?],

This is the first of many letters to come. Perhaps you will never be. Only God knows. If that is the case, these shall be left un-opened years, perhaps. Maybe one day they will be put into a time capsule.

[I was obsessed with time capsules. I buried one in our backyard, but was so excited about the prospect of digging up a time capsule that I unearthed it myself a year later. I still have it, complete with coins, newspaper clippings, letters, and the plastic top punctured by the pitchfork I used to dig it up.]

I love you will all my heart, and if I do not, it is my own fault because I would not wait for God to bring my husband to me. [Dang. What did I think would happen? That I would miss the God-picked husband and settled for a louse of a man whom I couldn't love with my whole heart? That any marriage problems I might have in the future were automatically my fault for missing "the one"? Yikes.]

But I pray that this is not the case. [Yeah, you'd better, girl. 'Cause if it is, that's it. You're stuck with that louse.]

Oh, darling, beloved, are you truly my Atticus? You are...and you always will be. [Oh. Yeah. I forgot that I had a thing for Atticus Finch. With his serious brow and clarity of speech, Atticus was to me the manliest of men.]

Per chance you may open this after we have had a quarrel. [Lovers didn't "argue," they "quarreled."] Please remember that I still love you [unless you're a louse], and that it is most likely only pride on both sides. [Yup, pride. Not the result of real differences of opinion. Because you are The One and we would never disagree, so it must be that doggone pride.]

Please remember that my heart is easily crushed, and do not misuse the power I gave you when I gave you my heart. But I trust you with my heart, and have no fear of putting it in your hands.

[This does make me wonder about how I conceived of love. Did I think my heart or affections was just something I could hand over to someone voluntarily? That you just decide to love or trust someone and PRESTO there they have your heart? Like so much of evangelical culture, I thought in binaries. Love was there or it wasn't. You had faith in God or you didn't. Your sexuality was awake or asleep, and goshdarnit you'd better not rouse that beast before you've met and married The One.]

Ever so much love [if you are The One],

Rebekah

The Art of the Email: How to Sound Like a Gentle Animal, Not an Asshole

A note to the general public about email correspondence.

Unless you have a solid reason to do otherwise, always give people the benefit of the doubt if you think they've made a mistake (and make that clear in your phrasing). People do make mistakes, and you can point out that an error has occurred and needs to be fixed without automatically assigning blame or attributing bad motives to people. (And then, if it turns out the mistake is yours, you won't have egg on your face.)

When you use passive aggressive language, it's rude and unhelpful. It's naturally frustrating when mistakes happen because they take effort and time to fix, but it doesn't help to vent your frustration by writing haughtily to the person you think made the mistake.

That said, it's easy to sound like an asshole through email, so when you receive a passive aggressive email (as I sometimes do), it's also good to remember that the emailer might not realize how terrible and entitled they sound.

In today's emailing saga, someone did not give me the benefit of the doubt, and although a mistake had been made, it wasn't mine (though even if it was my mistake, I'd certainly prefer a polite email). But I remembered my emailing rules and resisted the temptation to write a passive aggressive email back asserting my blamelessness, and instead simply explained in calm, kind language what my understanding of the situation was and how I thought the error could best be fixed.

I remembered that kind communication means thinking about the fact that there is a person on the other side reading those words, and it won't do any good to use accusatory language toward them just because they used it towards me.

Situations like this remind me that I have such a frail ego. I am sensitive and attentive to what people say, so when someone issues an unwarranted or unhelpful criticism, I rush to defend myself. But I need to remember that you don't fight fire with fire, and protecting myself cannot mean attacking someone else.

If I want to be a free and emotionally generous person, I need to remember that when someone doesn't give me the benefit of the doubt, it reflects poorly on them and not on me. I am trustworthy, I am kind (and when I am not, I own that and apologize).

But if I follow my gut reaction (to become defensive), this has the opposite effect and sets me on a trajectory of personhood that I don't want.

I don't want to be that person writing passive aggressive emails. I want to be that person addressing the world as though it were me. Because the world is me and I am the world. And I want, need, and deserve the warmth of generous faces.

With that in mind, here are some practical tips for sounding like a kind animal instead of a rude one.

Step 1: Write a Positive Intro

Getting straight to the issue is abrupt and sounds rude. Imagine you haven't spoken with someone in a day or two, and then they walk into a room and you immediately start to articulate a problem without greeting them first. It feels weird, like you bypassed their personhood. Start with a greeting or thanks:

Thanks for all the work you've done on planning this event. We're looking forward to it.

Or perhaps:

I hope this finds you well and that everything's coming along smoothly for the conference.

Step 2: State the Issue without Accusatory Phrasing

When you bring up the issue, avoid wording that implies the problem was the result of someone's maliciousness or incompetence. Avoid anything that sounds like you could flawlessly insert phrases like "you incompetent buffoon!" and have the basic structure remain intact:

The schedule you sent is different from what's on our calendar. I specifically asked that the  Florida speakers be scheduled in the morning and NOT after 12pm so that they could make their flights [but you didn't listen, you inattentive moron]. I thought this had been understood [you buffoon]. 

(Generally speaking, passive voice tends toward sounding passive aggressive because the object refuses to directly address the subject. The speaker won't take responsibility for her action or directly implicate the person to whom she speaks in the act of communication.)

Try a more generous tone such as this:

As I was looking over the materials you sent, I noticed that the scheduled time slots for the speakers are different from what I think we agreed to in our original correspondence. I'm not sure where the miscommunication took place, but I am hoping we can fix this together.

Step 3: Conclude with Thanks and Good Faith Expectations

Someone made a mistake or created a problem. Maybe it was you, maybe it was them. Maybe it was both. But for better or for worse, you have been collaborating on something together, and it's better to work toward a solution than to stay fixated on your annoyance at the problem. Someone has failed in some way, yes. But rather than making them feel bad about failing, you can give them the chance to make it right or correct their mistake, and extend your willingness to help make it right. Don't use language that reinforces that person's identity as a mistake-maker, but instead offer them a chance to reinforce their identity as a person who grows, changes, and can  become better. Avoid:

I will have to call the speakers myself and fix this. If the change of schedule ends up incurring further costs for flight changes, know that your organization will be billed for the increase.

Instead, try something that gives the person the opportunity to handle the issue, expecting that the person will deliver or accept your help if they feel they can't:

I'd be happy to reach out to the morning speakers myself if that would be helpful, but if you'd prefer to handle this yourself, I'm happy for you to do so.

Fighting 'Father' Myths On Father's Day

I feel like a half-ass daughter every Father's Day because I can never muster enough disingenuousness to call, email, or send my dad a card. Birthdays, sure. Christmas is a given. But on Father's Day – a day devoted to awesome dads – my honest soul just can't pretend to have a functional relationship.

I'm genuinely happy to read other people's celebrations of their dads on Facebook. They don't make me sad or even feel left out or unseen. But they do make me think of the many half-ass (or big-ass dreadful) fathers in the world whose absences or manipulative presences have inflicted lasting trauma on their kids.

They make me think about fatherhood and the many years I've spent traumatized in the wake of poor fatherhood. They make me wonder what myths about 'fatherhood' I've been living in.

I've carried an inconsolable longing for as long as I can remember: a mournful ache at the passing of all things, the grief-filled delight that pierces you when your eye lights for a split second on a single immanent presence. That moment when that which is near actually feels near. The deep, sorrowful joy generated by the inevitable loss of what is before you right now, the transmutation of all things.

I hold this longing with me always, though most often it stays buried inside until I pause (or am paused) and let my gaze be caught up in the beauty of a passing someone or something.

But I grew up having this feeling 'gendered' because I was born into a gendered world. In my patriarchal evangelical community, male and female roles were an unquestioned given, and also strictly defined. The 'father' was a very distinct role, which he could play well or poorly (or somewhere in between).

Without even knowing it was happening, I began to associate the sense of loss – the impending absence of everything present to me in its current form – with my own workaholic father's emotional absence.

I had been told by Christian dating and marriage books that good dads did specific things for their daughters. Dads were protectors, providers, and affirmers. Dads told their little girls that they were beautiful. This positive dad behavior was preparation for the time when their little girls grew up and got married to a godly man who would take on the masculine role of affirming her beauty and protecting her fragile ego.

Over time, I imbued that parental absence with specific, gendered qualities, which left me with a sense of perpetual woundedness and lack. It's left me always reaching out for masculine presences, and perpetually vulnerable to them as I seek external affirmation and approval. The space between the very real relational absence of one person estranged from another (me and my father) became filled with gendered ideas about what I needed from that relationship, prompting me to seek its type in other places.

It taught me to be forever unfulfilled, to be afraid of satisfaction.

It hasn't been until just recently that I've started to sift through how this 'gendering' of absence has weakened me and made me needy in particular, unhealthy ways.

I remember reading John Eldridge's books – Wild At Heart (about men) and Captivating (about women) – as a teenager and being enthralled by his description of "the Wound" that many women carry because of poor fathers. It resonated with me at the time because I felt that deep pain of parental estrangement.

The problem was that the book framed the ache with roles in view, with a very specific vision of what men and women are like and what they need. It cast women as needing certain things from husbands and fathers – things they couldn't get anywhere else. This set me up for a disposition of perpetual reliance on men for affirmation.

Instead of saying, "These are things all humans need and you can get them from a variety of different relationships of different kinds," it made women always dependent on men by saying to them, "You will always feel wounded until a man sees you and loves you."

The event that made me question this gendered need was getting to know the man who would become my husband.

Prior to meeting Josh, all my love interests (as varied as they were) had one thing in common: they scared me. I hung on their every word. I knew I couldn't rely on them for affirmation – they wouldn't always come through – but I always wanted it and mentally prepared myself for them to reject me or fail to affirm.

In this framework, God became the foil to my love interests. I identified God as the eternal Lover, the heavenly Father, the only Person who would see and accept me and think I was worthy. My love interests might fail me as my father had, but God would remain true.

But then I met Josh. And Josh...well...he wasn't 'masculine' in the way I'd understood it and we didn't relate to each other with the husband/wife dynamic I'd been taught to expect. We didn't do any of the typical male/female dances. He didn't scare me–I felt completely at ease. He was my friend before anything else. We liked many of the same things and we just kept talking about them and pursuing them. He thought I was beautiful, but that didn't really come into play until later.

I do feel strengthened and affirmed by his friendship and love (more than I ever could have imagined or hoped for). But the more we've talked about it and get deeper into our marriage, the more I realize that he has never filled any of those masculine roles I was fashioned to long for.

And the contrast between the gendered absences and Josh's presence couldn't be more stark. I feel healthy and whole with Josh. When I think of the person I am when I live in light of the gendered absence (who patriarchy fashioned me to be), I feel shamed. Because that schema, that myth of fatherhood, was always designed to keep me dependent. It never envisioned me as a woman who was as strong and autonomous as her partner. It never imagined I could find other wells from which to drink.

But in my real life – in my actual marriage – my partner and I are equals. We need each other (and others, too), but neither of us wants the other to be in an unending cycle of need. The more we grow together, the more we feel we must each strike out on our own as individuals – to know our own selves and interests. The things we share are important, but the things we don't share are equally important. We each want the other to grow strong and confident. My husband doesn't want me to be always wounded so that he can be my balm or healer. He wants us both to be in a process of healing and helping others heal, a mutual relationship.

I'm not sure how to end this post, and I suspect that's because dispelling fatherhood myths is an ongoing process. How do I extricate myself from the story without destroying my sense of self? I've been so shaped and defined by these stories – how can I maintain any form without them?

Maybe I can't.

Maybe the transmutation of all things – the constant movement that brightens my eyes and sets my chest aching – isn't the terror we make it out to be. Maybe we're better off always moving into ourselves.

I Frighten You, I Know

I Frighten You, I Know

I frighten you, I know,

and for that I am sorry, but

make no apologies.

My excess of being,

the weight of my glory,

encroaches on your modes 

of existence, your

storied performances

the exclude me from reality,

deny my provisional role

in the world, for 

I am 

the player that does fit 

the theology of your play,

yet nonetheless, 

I play 

   therefore

      I am.

Fear not, beloved.

I beg you: let me play,

let us play together.

I have spent too long

withdrawing into myself,

pausing the dance,

for fear that you 

would beat me back

into categories,

restrict our movements

to the same perpetual

steps.

I frighten you, I know,

because you think that

you think 

    therefore 

       you are,

and our thoughts conflict

and so, you think, must we.

Look at me.

Don't avert your eyes

or throw a proposition

between us to protect

yourself.

Look at me.

Look at this body.

Touch this body

Touch these scars.

See that I am flesh,

as you are flesh.

See that you and I

will turn to dust.

You frighten me, you know,

and for that, I am sorry, but

make no apologies.

My dread of being the liminal body

that confuses your senses

means that I ache as bodies ache

for mutual celebratory movement.

My fear of transgression

means that I so love our world,

so tremble for shared play, 

that I give my one and only body

over to the rabid terror,

the chest-searing prospect

of playing forever outside you.

On Our Anniversary, Let's Talk About Divorce

Josh and I reached our 7-year-anniversary yesterday (celebrations are forthcoming this weekend). As I thought about posting a little note on Facebook about how much I love and appreciate Josh, I thought of how easily "likable" such a post would be, how easily commemorated and supported. That's not necessarily bad, but like much of the performance that takes place via social media, it reinforces an identity and ideal that can become dangerous if we take it as a universal. 

I love Josh and we love being married, but if we've learned anything, it's that people change, circumstances change, and we have to constantly re-evaluate and re-negotiate our relationship. Will we still be together in 1, 5, 10, 20 years? We don't know. And that's a good thing. Because it means we have to pay attention to each other and the world around us instead of getting lazy and relying on rules or roles to keep our relationship strong.

I grew up in an environment that attached strong stigmas to divorce because of religious reasons. Staying together and making it "till death do us part" was the most important thing, even when a marriage relationship was long since broken beyond repair.

I believe in working at relationships, and that even very broken relationships can sometimes be repaired and renewed. But I also believe that divorce is sometimes necessary and the most healthy and sensible move for a relationship. No one's ever "happy" about divorce, it's not a "likable" event. But if we can't support folks as they go through divorce, what business do we have celebrating at their marriage vows? If we can't love and support two people separately, why did we ever think we could love and support them together?

As we celebrate our anniversary, I want to be cognizant of those who have experienced divorce (or may be going through a divorce). I'm grateful for the time Josh and I have had together, but it's not like we get a prize for making it 7 years. Marriage is not a marathon. You're not on a road to the goal of a long marriage so that you can get a big award at the end. The experience of the journey is the prize. 

If we know anything about journeys, it's that you take many unexpected roads, meet unanticipated people, and become different people. Your travel companions are not the same throughout your life, though some may walk with you a very long time. There's no inherent shame in parting ways when a relationship no longer makes sense.

I like Josh and hope we'll be together for years and years. He makes me a better person (and a happier one, too). But I hope, too, that if we ever reach a point where "we" no longer makes sense, that we would have the courage to part ways. That we'll know a parted relationship isn't a "failure" by default, that ends are not always a gauge of beginnings and middles. That even defining experiences as "failures" or "successes" is a truncated way of talking that doesn't jive with the way we actually encounter life as a complex web of relationships. 

We live, we move, we grow. We break, we heal (or are perpetually in the process of healing). We carry our wounds and scars not as badges of honor or marks of shame, but as memorials and guideposts. They mark where we have been and gesture to the hundred ways we might go.

We breath in and step out onto one of the hundred ways, not knowing where it will go. And in the going, we learn not where we are, but to be wherever we find ourselves.

Liberation and the God(s) of the Ancestors

Before Moses could lead the Hebrews out of captivity, he had to make a journey away from the gods of the empire that had enslaved his people and head into the wilderness to meet with the all-but-forgotten god of his ancestors, El-Shaddai. It was there, out in the desert, away from the powers that had shaped his identity since birth, he began to forge a new identity.

Moses was born into slavery to Hebrew parents in Egypt and yet was raised in the house of the Egyptian Pharaoh. His body housed the tension of the two incongruous worlds that he inhabited. 

He lived with his Hebrew birth mother and father until he was weaned. At his mother's breast, we can imagine, he was fed not only milk, but the mother tongue of his people and the beginnings of whatever stories and traditions the Hebrews had managed to retain under Egyptian domination. Close to his Hebrew mother's body, his skin learned the touch, scent, sound, and sight of his own people.

But the rest of Moses' growing up years were spent in the house of Pharaoh, near the seat of power that kept his Hebrew kindred oppressed and enslaved. Moses would have learned the patterns of thought and customs of the dominant culture. Moses' proximity to the empire afforded him certain powers and privileges. It was there, most likely, he learned to read and write, and gained a knowledge of politics. It was his status as a member of Pharaoh's household that kept him from a life of slavery.

But he was not Egyptian. Neither could he fully identify with the plight or traditions of his fellow Hebrews. When one day these two aspects of his mixed identity came head to head, he was forced to decide where his allegiances would lie. 

Exodus depicts very little of Moses' early years and young adulthood, but says that when Moses had grown up, he went out to his "brothers" (i.e. his fellow Hebrews) and looked on their hard labors. He witnessed an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, "one of his brothers," the narrator emphasizes. Moses kills the Egyptian and buries his body in the sand.

This is, it seems at first, a decisive and public statement of where Moses stands: he is Hebrew and will not tolerate the oppression of his people at the hands of the Egyptians. But a closer look at the text, we see that while is deeply troubled by the oppression of his Hebrew kindred (troubled enough to kill!), he is fearful about the discovery of what he has done. The murder was committed isolation and then hidden: "He looked this way and that, and seeing no one, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand."

We might imagine that Moses himself is shocked at his own actions. Has he not grown up in the house of Pharaoh? Has he not lived these years as an Egyptian?

But neither does his murder of an Egyptian overlord cement his identity as a Hebrew, in fact it may even have identified him more with their Egyptian masters. The next day, his identity is called into question by a Hebrew slave:

When he went out the next day, behold, two Hebrews were struggling together. And he said to the man in the wrong, “Why do you strike your companion?”

He answered, “Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?”

Then Moses was afraid, and thought, “Surely the thing is known.” When Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses. But Moses fled from Pharaoh and stayed in the land of Midian. (Exod. 2:14-15)

When Moses tries to arbitrate between two Hebrews, he is not accepted as a Hebrew leader nor is he respected as an Egyptian overlord. When the Hebrew man striking his brother retorts, "Who made you a prince and a judge over us?" he is getting to the heart of Moses' identity conflict. Is he to be identified with Pharaoh's house? Does he have the authority of Egypt to act as prince and judge over these two Hebrew slaves fighting one another?

"Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?"

The man's question is a challenge, an indictment. In murdering the Egyptian, Moses has made himself ruler and judge over the Egyptian, but he is a self-appointed ruler. He has shown that he resembles those who grow up in the house of Pharaoh, that he has learned their violent ways. On what grounds can he identify with the Hebrew slaves?

But now he is neither a son of Egypt nor a Hebrew. Pharaoh seeks to kill him for murdering the Egyptian, and Moses flees to Midian.

Moses will return to Egypt one day to confront Pharaoh and help lead the Hebrews out of Egypt. But for now he is a stranger in a strange land, neither a prince of Egypt nor a Hebrew slave.

Never Forget: Veterans, the Death Penalty, and Terror Lynchings

On this Memorial Day 2017, I remember Manny Babbitt, a Vietnam veteran who was executed by the state of California on May 3, 1999.  Pictured here is Manny's brother, Bill, who travels and tells his brother's story. You can watch the award-winning documentary about Bill and Manny Babbitt, The Last Day of Freedom, on Netflix, or read about their story in the seventh chapter of Executing Grace (pp. 164-168).

Sadly, Manny's story isn't an anomaly. A veteran returns home suffering from PTSD, doesn't receive the needed medical and psychological care, ends up committing a violent crime, and is sentenced to death.

On this Memorial Day 2017, I think of two recent reports that remind us that caring about veterans looks like (among other things) a renewed commitment to both ending the death penalty and addressing America's history and present of systemic racism. (And the death penalty and racism have a sordid and complex relationship. Check out Shane Claiborne's chapter in Executing Grace on race, the death penalty, and lynchings, or watch him discuss it here.)

The first report is from the Death Penalty Information Center called Battle Scars: Military Veterans and the Death Penalty. You can read the whole report for yourself, but this excerpt from the Executive Summary on page 3 is apt:

PTSD has affected an enormous number of veterans returning from combat zones. Over 800,000 Vietnam veterans suffered from PTSD. At least 175,000 veterans of Operation Desert Storm were affected by "Gulf War Illness," which has been linked to brain cancer and other mental deficits. Over 300,000 veterans from the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts have PTSD. In one study, only about half had received treatment in the prior year.

Even with these mental wounds and lifetime disabilities, the overwhelming majority of veterans do not commit violent crime. Many have been helped, and PTSD is now formally recognized in the medical community as a serious illness. But for those who have crossed an indefinable line and have been charged with capital murder, compassion and understanding seem to disappear. Although a definitive count has yet to be made, approximately 300 veterans are on death row today, and many others have already been executed.

Perhaps even more surprising, when many of these veterans faced death penalty trials, their service and related illnesses were barely touched on as their lives were being weighed by judges and juries. Defense attorneys failed to investigate this critical area of mitigation; prosecutors dismissed, or even belittled, their claims of mental trauma from the war; judges discounted such evidence on appeal; and governors passed on their opportunity to bestow the country's mercy. In older cases, some of that dismissiveness might be attributed to ignorance about PTSD and related problems. But many of those death sentences still stand today when the country knows better.

This first report reminds us that inadequate care for military veterans sometimes leads to tragic and preventable violence, both the violence that might have been prevented if the veteran's PTSD had been well-addressed, and unequivocally preventable violence of the state against the veteran.

Another report, published by the Equal Justice Initiative, reminds us that returning black veterans in particular have not just been inadequately cared for, but have been the targets of violence and racial terror. You can read Lynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans online or in PDF, but Bryan Stevenson's opening remarks are worth quoting:

The end of the Civil War marked a new era of racial terror and violence directed at black people in the United States that has not been adequately acknowledged or addressed in this country. Following emancipation in 1865, thousands of freed black men, women, and children were killed by white mobs, former slave owners, and members of the Confederacy who were unwilling to accept the anticipated end of slavery and racial subordination. The violent response to freedom for former slaves was followed by decades of racial terror lynchings and targeted violence designed to sustain white supremacy and racial hierarchy.

No one was more at risk of experiencing violence and targeted racial terror than black veterans who had proven their valor and courage as soldiers during the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Because of their military service, black veterans were seen as a particular threat to Jim Crow and racial subordination. Thousands of black veterans were assaulted, threatened, abused, or lynched following military service.

The disproportionate abuse and assaults against black veterans have never been fully acknowledged. This report highlights the particular challenges endured by black veterans in the hope that our nation can better confront the legacy of this violence and terror. No community is more deserving of recognition and acknowledgment than those black men and women veterans who bravely risked their lives to defend this country’s freedom only to have their own freedom denied and threatened because of racial bigotry.

Arbitrary Coffee: What 'Just Cuz' Drinks Teach Us about Desire

Riproariously Wonderful Pleasure

A few days ago, I reached out to a local coffee roaster about the possibility of apprenticing with them. I haven't heard back yet, and per my modus operandi, I've had many an imaginary conversation with them in my head, explaining why I love coffee, and what I hope to contribute to the roastery and gain from the experience.

"What do you love about coffee?" the imaginary roasters query.

I smile, a bit sheepishly, almost blushing. The answer is embarrassing, really. I'm not sure I even know why I love coffee, only that I get a ridiculous amount of pleasure from grinding, pouring, and drinking craft coffee.

The experience of delight makes you vulnerable, and so you avert your eyes, and perhaps shrug with a grin, when someone discovers your unmitigated pleasure. The wild and abashing fact is that there is no "reason." Pleasure really is "just cuz." 

You might be able to describe certain features of an experience that you think make it pleasurable. And of course I do this in my whimsical conversation with the roasters. 

I wax eloquent about the beauty of coffee pouring as a centering, grounding ritual, and how the act of taking the time to measure and moderate the temperature and make a slow cup creates an atmosphere of peace. I talk about the aromas and tastes of various coffees, and how they make me calm and comforted and attentive to the space or task before me. I talk about how each cup evokes memories of shared coffees past, of social bonds formed over coffee, or the enjoyment of cups in sweet solitude.

These are all things I love about coffee, but these are aspects, descriptors. They are features I enjoy, and these change from person to person according to each person's distinct characteristics and experiences. We may even venture to call these causes, elements that lead to the experience of pleasure.

But the pleasure itself is utterly reasonless, arbitrary. This kind of enjoyment is excessive, luxurious. Not utilitarian. Why should I receive pleasure from coffee? I can't think of why. I can only inhale with wonder and laugh at the revelation: "Damn. I do. I do love it and it's glorious and fantastically unnecessary, but riproariously wonderful all the same."  I might even say that it's glorious and fantastical because it's unnecessary.

Just Cuz Drinks

When pressed by my chimerical interlocutors to say what I love about coffee, I tell them that I love what coffee teaches us about human desire.

Unlike food and water, which are physical necessities for survival, beverages like coffee and tea are almost always consumed for pleasure or as a social convention, something apart from their nutritional value for the body. Yes, you can get things that benefit your body from certain drinks (teas especially: hydration, antioxidants and others good things), but these are distinct from the social currency and emotional value of coffee and tea, and even from the pleasure factor.

I like to think of these as Just Cuz beverages because you don't need them to survive. They are for pleasure and/or the creating or strengthening of a social bond. What I find fascinating about Just Cuz beverages is that we find them across the economic spectrum. Just Cuz drinks may vary in quality, kind, and expense, but everyone drinks them if they are able, whether it's a cheap cup made with a scoop of instant coffee or the most expensive cup of aeropress made from the rarest beans. 

What might this tell us about human desire? I think, at a minimum, it tells us that humans need more than just the bare necessities of physical survival. We all need a measure of luxury, the delight of excess. 

I don't remember much from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn from high school literature class (sorry, mom!), but I do remember that Francie Nolan's mother always let her children pour their leftover tea down the sink if they wanted. They were very poor and couldn't afford to waste food, but the reason the mother gave for letting her kids pour their beverage leftovers down the drain was this: she wanted them to feel like they had one thing they had the luxury of wasting.

The disposability of the tea was important. Francie's freedom to be able to drink as much as she desired and throw away any excess meant she had the dignity (that everyone deserves) of being more than her basic survival needs. I think of that tea swirling down the drain as an act of protest against the Nolan's poverty, and perhaps even an indictment against the over-excesses of the wealthy.

Daily Bread and Cuppa Joe

The fact that we pursue enjoyment of coffee and other useless beverages tell us that we're embarrassingly delighted, hedonistic animals.

I like to think, too, that the fact that we like to share useless beverages together suggests that we're at our best when we're not being stingy with our luxuries, but always sharing our excess.  Luxuries are a human necessity, but hoarding our own luxuries (be they small or great) creates scarcity for others and ends up subverting our own hedonistic impulses.

We can't enjoy luxuries when we're too focused on gathering our excesses and possessing them. They become crutches that keep us worrying about future security and future pleasures instead of focusing our attention on the glory of the present Just Cuz pleasure before us right now.

They also make us insular and distract us from the plight of the poor who, just like everyone else, not only need their basic physical needs me, but also the dignity of luxuries. Food and drink often function as status symbols, and we do injury to ourselves and our neighbors when we treat luxuries as if we own them or are more deserving of them than anyone else, as if having luxuries somehow makes us more important than those with less. We rob ourselves and our neighbors of joy when we cannot share what we have.

So, drink on, friends! Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die. But remember that today your neighbor, like you, is in need of both daily bread and the arbitrary delight of a cuppa joe, so share what you have and enjoy it to the full.

The Arm

The Arm

the ghost pain in the severed arm,
the twitch in the lost limb,
is the trace of your religion,
cherished, beloved, and gangrenous
long before amputation.

the doctor shakes his head.
"tissue decays by wounds
untreated," he says. "loss was not
inevitable. it could have been saved."

the familiar throb of absence
prophesies against the word of this seer.

god was the absence that fueled your ache,
the holy ghost that haunted the space
between your radius and ulna.
the removal of this absence
evokes the same old sensations,
the same pangs of wild grief,
the same rattling in the bones.

you could not have been saved.
you are the member cut off
for the body's salvation,
the limb chopped at the wrist
lest the whole blessed body stumble into hell.
you are the riven hand groping in the dark
for the form of a choate body.

peace, my love, peace. 
quiet your sundered heart. 
seek not the wholeness
of a sutured corpse.

let the dead bury their dead.
you are not this piece of rotted flesh.

you are the ghost cells burning
in the imminent arm of the starfish,
the organic radiance of the cosmos
growing forever into itself.

Mars Concurred by Venus

Naked Gods

When I sift through the files on my computer, I'll usually stumble across MSW docs with old poems. I came across a poem I wrote in 2011 or 2012 in response to a painting called Mars Concurred by Venus by Krassimir Kolev (image and poem below).

The imagery of the poem is a bit strained in spots (I'm not sure feet dripping with fancy wines is the most apt post-coital description), but I like the poem's simpler images. This poem also signals a small, but significant, transition in my own attitude toward bodies.

Before Mars Concurred, I was at ease with nudes in older paintings that sat in museums. They had been baptized into the purity of classical art, the purity of God (who, rather awkwardly, appears to approve only of nudes from the West and from a limited era in history). Portrayals of naked bodies in this context felt somehow safer since they fell under this approved rubric.

But Kolev's painting felt different to me. I loved its sensuality and let myself love it even though it didn't fall into the sanctioned categories (even if it was of similar stuff). More importantly, I loved it not because the Western tradition had slapped on labels of "true," "good," or "beautiful," but because its details intrigued me: its colors, shapes, and textures, its composition. I let myself write a poem about it, trying to fashion with words an image of the visual image I had encountered.

Concurring Gods

Kolev's painting is both contemporary and evocative, a nod to (or perhaps a play on) Botticelli's painting, Mars and Venus. 

The scene in Botticelli's painting is often described as "Mars conquered by Venus," the god of war overcome by the goddess of love. Kolev's title plays on this. Mars is not conquered, but concurred: he is in agreement, coincides, coexists. The language of war becomes the language of mutual desire.

This mutuality is also revealed in the way Kolev positions Mars and Venus differently than Botticelli does.

Botticelli's Mars and Venus lie apart after lovemaking. Mars sleeps, naked except for a cloth draped across his loins, while a fully clothed Venus looks on. She has conquered him and he is drained by the ardors of intercourse, but she is fully awake, unspent, and quickly puts her clothes back on.

Kolev's Mars and Venus lie together, their exhausted bodies tangled on the pile of clothes and armor onto which they have fallen. Both sleep unclothed. Both rest in the sensual satisfaction of mutual desire. Neither has conquered the other. Love and war are both undone.

Above them, Cupid hovers. You could presume he is behind it all: that Venus and Mars have been struck by Cupid's arrow and sent into a frenzy of love. But I like to imagine that Cupid is too late. They do not need the little god's arrows to hurl one or the other into a passion.

The young god curses. This had better not happen again or soon he'll be out of a job. What will become of him when the lovers of the world, whether humans or gods, discover they do not need Cupid's arrows in order to be struck with desire?

View fullsize

Mars Concurred by Venus by Krassimir Kolev. Retrieved from Saatchi Art.

On Mars Concurred by Venus

The gods lie tangled

like two sheaves of wheat

plaited

by prairie gusts,

skin bright as beaten bronze,

but raw and pliable as clay –

their fallow feet, long and

leathern, drip

Dolcetto, Moscato, Arneis.

Their bodies recumbent,

limbs protracted, loose and

unfreighted

after the ardors of love,

knees bent in consummate sleep,

spent as copper deer

beneath a charcoal moon.

And above them a nascent god

hovers, lustily clutching his arrows,

cursing his late arrival.

"Bad SWTS!" What White People Can Learn from a "Racially Insensitive Photo"

As I reflect on the reactions to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary's "racially insensitive photo" and subsequent apology, I am reminded of a passage from Drew G.I. Hart's Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism.

Near the end of the second chapter, he remarks on the way in which many responded to the news that Paula Deen had made some ugly, racist comments and had at one point in her life considered having a southern plantation-style wedding with all black servers. Paula Deen ended up apologizing and doing the "look, I have a black friend, so I can't be racist" dance. Hart writes:

America was not buying it. Deen's racism was too overt, and she broke all the rules. She used what we could call "old-school racism," which is no longer acceptable in the public square, instead of "new school racism," which has shifted its rhetoric to fit the times. Americans of almost all backgrounds and classes wagged their fingers at this woman in disgust. You could almost hear everyone thinking, "Bad Paula Deen!" Well, guess what? Pointing to Deen's racially offensive words was not particularly spectacular or courageous. Rather, it was the expected response within America's twenty-first century context. Don't get me wrong. I am not going to defend Paula Deen in the slightest. That would be absurd! I am not suggesting that we consider her comments anything other than racist ideology and speech. All I am suggesting is this: the scapegoating of Paula Deen is the sophisticated cultural reflex of a highly racialized society that doesn't want to own up to how racism works systemically. (p. 53)

As Hart has said in other contexts, Paula Deen didn't invent racism. Neither did the professors at Southwestern Baptist who staged and posted the photo. What is more troubling to me than the photo itself is the fact that the professors were unaware that this was even problematic. The staging and posting of the original photo, along with the subsequent statement from the seminary's president, tell me that these representatives of SWBTS lack awareness of the very fact that we are all swimming in the waters of a racialized society. 

The photo is not the primary problem. The problem is not that it happened, but why it happened. It is evidence of a racialized environment, and one which both the president and the professors who posted the photo seem to be unaware of. This wasn't just a "mistake" or a one-off time where professors exercised a lack of judgement. It was a moment when a specific group of white people was caught (in a very public way) perpetuating systemic racism and failing to acknowledge this or live in resistance to it.

If there is a "mistake," it is that we showed our hand to the world, that we don't just lack an understanding of the "nuances of the racist past of our own country," but that we're blithely unaware of the part we play in our country's racist past and present.

And I say "we" because I think it is important for me as a white person not to wag my finger and say, "Bad seminary professors!" It won't do for white people to scapegoat SWBTS and think, "Gee whiz. Glad I'm not like those guys over there." Systemic racism isn't something you have or don't have, it's a world you inhabit. You can go along with the flow or you can begin to cultivate a life of resistance to it in order to dismantle it, to change the shape of the world. But you can't resist if you are unaware of it, which is why we need more than apologies. We need plans and actions.

Self-flagellation won't do. When I first started to become aware of systemic racism, some of my first responses were disorientation and guilt. I knew there was a problem, but I still wasn't quite clear on what my role was, what I'd done, or how to work toward making things right. So my white evangelical reflexes kicked in and I performed that narrative: feel guilty and say, "I'm sorry. I'll do better next time."

But this "I'm sorry, I'll do better next time" mentality is an example of the kind of "cheap grace" on which white American evangelicalism so often feeds. The theological underpinnings of this are the belief that not only is it okay to mess up, but that we are doomed to mess up because we're "sinners"--that's who we are. We don't actually believe that we can "do better next time." In this framework, forgiveness will and must always be available because we won't be able to make significant change. We will mess up again. No matter how hard we try, we will always fail.

This leaves the door wide open for us to commit perpetual wrongs without every repenting (except in word) or making plans to work toward change. It ends up scapegoating the "sin" so that the "sinner" doesn't have to live any differently. We assume the identity of a "sinner," but a "sinless-sinner" because Jesus has washed all that sin away. We find ourselves not only living in a mode of perpetual failure, but perpetual complicity. We can do no right, but we can also do no wrong. This mode of perpetual guilty/clean also leads us to be unspecific in our "confessions," not really articulating an understanding of what we've even done because it doesn't seem to matter. We can't change the details will be wiped away anyway.

If we want to confront this bad theology, we need to recognize that apologies are not enough. We can apologize up the wazoo and even feel bad about ourselves, but that won't help us become good allies or necessarily help us take practical steps toward dismantling white supremacy. We can feel sincere and contrite, but without understanding and action, this ends up compounding the problem because this cycle excuses us from doing the real work of educating ourselves and moving.

I'm no expert on what practical steps to take to end white supremacy, but I do know that the movement must be led by people of color (and actually is being led by POC and has been for years, whether or not white people have been paying attention). White people have been trying to decide "what's best" for POC for ages, and it hasn't worked out so well. And it can't be a matter of white people "having a conversation about race," but choosing to pay attention to what POC are saying and have been saying.

To that end, I have some suggestions both for individuals and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Individuals: start doing some homework. Read. Find blogs and books by POC. Don't get bogged down by your own sense of ignorance or feeling like you don't know what to say or do. You will learn, you will start to do better. Don't be paralyzed by your discomfort or petrified by indifference. We must move. The more you study under POC, the more you will get a sense of what you should and should not do, how you have hurt/hindered the movement and how you can help.

To SWBTS: make a public commitment to listening to POC with an aim toward cultivating change, and make a plan. Invite faith leaders, educators, and activists of color to be the primary contributors on panel discussions for students, faculty, and staff on race, racism, and white supremacy. Invite these contributors to smaller, more intimate meetings with college administrators to discuss how best to construct and implement mandatory courses on race and racism into the seminary's curriculum. Create committees (led by POC) to review the seminary's policies and structures to identify any procedures or approaches that contribute to structural racism. Invite POC to help you make a more detailed and specific plan of action.

These are just a few ideas that came to mind this week. What's most important is not for you to listen to me, but to go study under POC. So go. Read. Listen. Go and scapegoat no more.