I’m back from a fabulous weekend in NYC. Thanks again to Housing Works Used Book Cafe for hosting our poetry and fiction reading last Thursday. I encourage everyone to shop there when in Manhattan. They have a great selection of books, including genres that aren’t always well-represented in used bookstores, such as performing arts and graphic novels. All profits are donated to provide housing and social services for poor people with HIV and AIDS.
I’d also like to give a shout-out to the folks at the Rainbows & Triangles bookstore in Chelsea, for helping me with some (fully clothed) research for my novel; On the Ave Hotel, which belongs to the CleanHotels network whose members refuse to offer in-room adult movies; and Laila Rowe, because you can never have too many magenta accessories.
Our regularly scheduled bitching about the Episcopal Church will resume tomorrow. Meanwhile…wear all the sequins you got!
Monthly Archives: January 2007
Essay on Jack Gilbert at Poets.org
The Academy of American Poets website has posted a fine essay by Dan Albergotti on the poetry of Jack Gilbert. Now in his 80s, this reclusive poet is equal parts Desert Father and Zorba the Greek. His work combines the spiritual purity of long solitude with an earthy, almost childlike delight in physical pleasures. Of his fourth and most recent collection, Refusing Heaven (2005), Albergotti observes:
Fittingly, there is a sense of finality to these poems. In a recent interview with John Freeman for Poets & Writers, Gilbert said multiple times as a matter of fact and without self-pity, “I am probably going to die in the next few years.” With characteristically perfect self-awareness, he understands and accepts the declining arc of this life that he has dedicated to poetry. In fact, Gilbert has always embraced his mortality in a way that recalls Keats. He believes in the inevitability and finality of our bodies’ failure, but also in the redemptive power of the heart and imagination in the time we are allowed. In “The Manger of Incidentals,” he insists, “We live the strangeness of being momentary, / and still we are exalted by being temporary.” Though we may all be doomed to ultimate failure, we can achieve momentary triumph, like Camus’s Sisyphus, with perspective and courage. Even Icarus, a character traditionally mocked for his foolishness, is rehabilitated from such a viewpoint. In “Failing and Flying,” Gilbert says, “Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.” The flying was worth the fall. The revelation was worth the hardship. At the end of the poem, Gilbert makes an assertion that I cannot help reading in the context of his refusal of literary stardom and his embracing of obscurity and poverty: “I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, / but just coming to the end of his triumph.”I had the privilege of hearing Gilbert read at Smith College two years ago. Though wizened and frail, he still had a fire in his eyes that might well attract a sensitive young poetess. He couldn’t see the words on the page too well, and at one point, after stumbling over the words of his poem, he shrugged and smiled, and said, “Whatever.” That mix of humility and virile assurance is the basis for his unique charisma —
a word that comes from charism, an anointing, a sacred gift.
Fiction Online: “Breaking Bottles” by Gary Ferrar
This story from the new online journal New York Review takes a witty yet heartbreaking look at growing older, the search for “authenticity,” and the burden of living up to our literary heroes. This line in particular won me over: “‘Do or die’ is the way that people live these days. As if extreme emotions are insurance against not really being alive.”
What Makes Me Important
For several years after I became a Christian, I worried a lot about my mission in life. I felt it was no longer enough to use my abilities in the way that made me happy. God had rescued me from some very dark times in my life, so I felt obligated to respond — perhaps not to “deserve” it, which would be impossible, but to show that I was grateful and to try to act like someone worth saving. This is a surefire recipe for writer’s block if one focuses on making the outcome worthwhile, as opposed to seeking God in the process, as I’m just now beginning to do.
Anyway, I used to be anxious that if God did have a secret destiny planned for me, it would either be something really unpleasant involving Third World standards of hygiene, or something that made my individuality completely irrelevant. What if all this writing, thinking, relating, etc. were beside the point, and my sole reason for being here was to drop the banana peel that the Antichrist slipped on?
Well, maybe it is, but I no longer think that would be such a bad thing. In the Old Testament, there are several troubling stories where God seems to be killing large groups of people in order to make a point to the ones left alive. Not all of these people are personally guilty of anything, such as the infants in Jericho. This sort of thing fed my fears for a long time till it suddenly occurred to me: We all have to die. It’s not as if we’re entitled to a default state of happiness or immortality. In that case, there are worse ways to go than being used by God to save others.
One of the main themes of my novel-in-progress is this often humorous, random way that people’s destinies can interact, so that our attempts at virtue may alienate us from one another, while our vices may ultimately bring us down the only road that leads to reconciliation. We can’t engineer this paradox from the outset: “Let us sin that grace may abound? Certainly not!” says St. Paul. It simply happens, and reminds us not to think we know our own or others’ worth in God’s eyes. I love the 19th-century novels that are so full of these providential coincidences (Dickens and Victor Hugo were especially fond of them); whereas in the modern secular novel, the failure of our self-made meanings often ends in despair, not grace.
A good article on this topic can be found on the Hasidic website Chabad.org here.
N.T. Wright Interview: Presenting the Gospel in a Postmodern World
The incomparable New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, who is the bishop of Durham, England, talks in this January 2007 Christianity Today interview about his recent book Simply Christian, restoring the political dimension of the gospel, and the continuing appeal of Gnosticism. Some highlights:
“It is possible to say more or less all the orthodox Christian affirmations, but to join them up in the wrong story. It’s possible to tick the boxes that say Trinity, Incarnation, Atonement, Resurrection, Spirit, Second Coming, and yet it’s like a child’s follow-the-dots. The great story—and after all the Bible is fundamentally a story—we’ve got to pay attention to that, rather than abstracting dogmatic points from it. The dogmas matter, they are true, but you have to join them up the right way.Read the whole thing here.
“There’s a certain kind of modernist would-be orthodoxy, which uses the word God in something like the old Deist sense. He’s a distant, absentee landlord who suddenly decides to intervene in the world after all, and he looks like Jesus. But we already know who God is; now I want you to believe that this God became human in Jesus. The New Testament routinely puts it the other way around. We don’t actually know who God is. We have some idea, the God of Israel, or of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Creator God. But until we look hard at Jesus, we really haven’t understood who God is.
“That’s precisely what John says at the end of the prologue: No one has ever seen God; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the father, he has made him known. John’s provided an exegesis for who God is. And in Colossians 1 as well, he is the image of the invisible God. In other words, don’t assume that you’ve got God taped, and fit Jesus into that. Do it the other way. We all come with some ideas of God. Allow those ideas to be shaped around Jesus. That is the real challenge of New Testament Christology.
“What happened with the Enlightenment is the denarrativization of the Bible. And then within postmodernity, people have tried to pay attention to the narrative without paying attention to the fact that it’s a true story. “
****
“For generations the church has been polarized between those who see the main task being the saving of souls for heaven and the nurturing of those souls through the valley of this dark world, on the one hand, and on the other hand those who see the task of improving the lot of human beings and the world, rescuing the poor from their misery.
“The longer that I’ve gone on as a New Testament scholar and wrestled with what the early Christians were actually talking about, the more it’s been borne in on me that that distinction is one that we modern Westerners bring to the text rather than finding in the text. Because the great emphasis in the New Testament is that the gospel is not how to escape the world; the gospel is that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Lord of the world. And that his death and Resurrection transform the world, and that transformation can happen to you. You, in turn, can be part of the transforming work.”
Poem: “The World Looks Back” (two versions)
This poem of mine was inspired by an interview with Walter Wangerin Jr. at the 2006 Calvin College Festival of Faith & Writing. I’m not sure which version I like best, so I welcome reader feedback in the comments box. The first version below is the original; the second is forthcoming in Southern Poetry Review.
The World Looks Back (v.1)
Give me the disinterested miracle,
someone else’s breakfast
made bigger, the fingertip sheared by the mower
rejoined cozy as a found button.
Give me the half-wild cat’s eye
luminescent in the twilit hedge,
her awareness catching me up in its
dark river.
She shakes the dust from her ruffed face,
rolls at my feet, then bolts — but not far,
looking back, her startled face fringed
by ladyslippers.
Let me pass, mystified, through her intense,
hidden story.
Why else would I shiver in the April dawn
to watch two scraps of blue defend their
nesting box —
sit on a pole, fly in circles, return, repeat —
a dull, dangerous life, but not my own.
I want to hear the dogwood,
its squared-off ivory flowers
tipped with rust like sheets stained by childbirth,
rejoicing in its mission.
The voice that moves the scenery
sometimes gives it lines. So give me the angel
telling my neighbor to catch a train.
The two-headed rabbits, beloved monsters
of the tabloids, the pepper with a baby inside.
I don’t want to be the last man alive in
the restaurant,
even if I can cook. Bees are weaving
through the pink streamers of the weeping cherry.
One interrupts its geometric language
to assault my kitchen window
with dreadful, comical thumps.
Good glass between us
keeping our lives diverse.
Let me be here and also
the strange mosaic in his eye.
********
The World Looks Back (v.2)
Give me the disinterested miracle,
someone else’s breakfast
made bigger, the fingertip sheared by the mower
rejoined cozy as a found button.
Give me the half-wild cat’s eye
luminescent in the twilit hedge.
She shakes the dust from her ruffed face,
rolls at my feet, then bolts — but not far,
looking back, her startled face fringed
by ladyslippers.
Why else would I shiver in the April dawn
to watch two scraps of blue defend their
nesting box —
sit on a pole, fly in circles, return, repeat —
a dull, dangerous life, but not my own.
I want to hear the dogwood,
its squared-off ivory flowers
tipped with rust like sheets stained by childbirth,
rejoicing in its mission.
The voice that moves the scenery
sometimes gives it lines. So give me the angel
telling my neighbor to catch a train.
The two-headed rabbits, beloved monsters
of the tabloids, the pepper with a baby inside.
I don’t want to be the last man alive in
the restaurant,
even if I can cook.
Bees are weaving
through the pink streamers of the weeping cherry.
One interrupts its geometric language
to assault my kitchen window
with dreadful, comical thumps.
Let me be here and also
the wild mosaic in his eye.
forthcoming in Southern Poetry Review
Letters to Sam Harris
Evangelical theologian Douglas Wilson last November posted a series of “open letters” on his blog to Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation, that are well worth a read. Harris, following in the footsteps of atheist evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, is the latest popular writer to indict religion (i.e. Christianity) as divisive, oppressive and intellectually backward. A sample of Wilson’s responses:
Further along in the series, Wilson turns around the argument that a good and powerful God is incompatible with the suffering we see in the world:
Your next section asks the question, “Are Atheists Evil?” Your argument here rests upon a common misunderstanding of a standard Christian argument. In short, the issue is not whether atheists are evil, but rather, given atheism, what possible definition can we find for evil. The argument is not one about personal character but rather about what the tenets of atheism logically entail.
But there is another wrinkle as well. The Christian position is not that atheists are sinners, but rather that people are sinners. Consequently, when any false ideology (atheistic or theistic) gets hold of a collective group of people, there is bound to be an area where there are no brakes to restrain the natural sinful tendencies of the people involved. This will of course manifest itself in different ways according to the differences of the ideologies. It explains why nations that are formally atheistic are awful (and dangerous) places to live. But at the same time, we could all rattle off false ideologies that were theistic and which also turned the places they controlled into hellholes. This just means that men sin in different ways.
So all this happens because people are sinners — and the Christian faith accounts for the reality and influence of this sin.
You are exactly right that all Christians, if they are to be intellectually honest, must acknowledge that God is the ultimate governor of earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, genocides, and wars. This creates the “problem of evil” for us. How can a God who is infinitely just, kind, merciful, and loving (which we Christians also affirm) be the same one who unleashes these terrible “acts of God?” It is a good question, but it is one that can only be answered by embracing the problem. We solve the problem of evil by kissing the rod and the hand that wields it.Read the whole series here.
This sounds outrageous to you, I know, but it is the only way to genuinely deal with the problem of evil. It is either “the problem of evil,” which the Christian has, or “evil? no problem!” which the atheist has. Consider the tsunami, and what that event was, from your premises. You spoke of the day “one hundred thousand children were simultaneously torn from their mother’s arms and casually drowned” (p. 48). Now I can only understand being indignant with God over this if He is really there. But what if He is not there? What follows then? This event had no more ultimate significance than a solar flare, or a virus going extinct, or a desolate asteroid colliding with another asteroid, or the gradual loss of Alabama to kudzu, or me scratching my head just now. These are just atoms, banging around. This is what they do.
It is very clear from how you write that you do not believe that God is there, and you are also very angry with Him for not being there. Many of these people who were drowned were no doubt praying before they died. You throw that fact at us believers (which you can do, because, believing in God, we do have a problem of evil). But if we throw it back to you, what must you say about the tsunami and its effects? It was a natural event, driven by natural causes, and has to be seen as an integral part of the natural order of things. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it. These things happen.
Walter Wangerin Jr. Cancer Update
Walter Wangerin Jr., one of the finest Christian novelists around, was tragically diagnosed with cancer last year and has been posting updates on his website about his spiritual and physical progress. Let me rephrase that. He is not only a great “Christian novelist” but the most warm-hearted, humorous, prophetic writer one could imagine, someone who transcends all boundaries of genre and subculture. I was particularly struck by these comments from his December letter:
I have never construed my cancer as my enemy. No, I do not judge others who do (thoughtfully) choose it, for whom “fighting” may be a helpful stance and attitude. On the other hand I am critical of the media when, without genuine thought or analysis, it routinely declares in its death notices, that so-and-so died “after a long battle with cancer.” Why does it have to be a “battle”? What: are folks with cancer good fighters if they win? Bad fighters, failing knights, if they lose? Can they be heroic only in triumph? It really isn’t an issue of defeat or victory. We are all going to die: what a terrible, terribly total annihilation such language must make of our slaughters individual and wholesale, of our universal losses to sickness, disease and death.Read the whole thing here. And pray for Walt.
Why not use the imagery that acknowledges how one experiences dying?–how one behaves in the face of death?–what one has to offer those who stand by in love and relationship? These have been forms of discussion very familiar in the church of the past. Read Jeremy Taylor, HOLY LIVING and HOLY DYING. Before sciences and the medical profession began (indirectly) to persuade us that cures could be possible for every disease we might diagnose, describe, explain and name; before commercials began to establish it as a principle that each affliction identified also had an antidote; before our society made “feeling good” an individual human right (setting at enmity anything that made us feel bad) we did not have so self-centered, so childish, so simplistic, so unavailing and purposeless a frame of reference for the experience of sickness-unto-death.
Why not use the imagery of the psalmists in the Hebrew Scriptures? A human is his body or hers (note: even my genitive language here supposes a possessor of the body, this possessor [a soul? a mind?] supposed to be the “real” person). Never in isolation, the body/individual exists ever and only in relationships: to elements of creation; to a people, a tribe, a family; to God. Suffering a physical sickness, then, is to experience the effects of breakage in the body’s significant relationships. Sickness is not an enemy. It is a rooster’s crow, calling me to the truth of myself and to the precise condition of my relationships–God, society, nature. Enemies? The psalmist knows some. Those who hate God. Those people(s) who attack him–yes, and who hurt him in the attack, for wounding is distinguished from physical disease; but even human warfare and defeat (see the books of Joshua and Judges) are attributed to disobedience, our breaking of God’s commandments, our breaking of the divine relationship.
For my own part, I recognize cancer cells as parts of me (of Walt, the body-soul continuum), tissue which is part of all my tissue–even as my children are a parts of our family (without whom the family itself would be something else). They (whether cells or kids) become selfish, demanding more of the resources of the family (of the body) than other members can receive. My children are not my enemy. And my diseases, far from acting the foe, are profound initiators of spiritual clarity, devout meditation, a faithful (a peaceful!) seeking after God, praying, shaping thanksgivings for Jesus’s re-building of the relationship between God the Father and me. And just this (the reconciliation Jesus effected between the All-Father and all children) becomes the object of my most careful contemplations. And these contemplations themselves are made more patient and more mature by the disease and by the convictions of mortality which the disease infused in me.
God Hidden in Our Stories
Pastor and freelance writer Shawna Atteberry has a sermon posted on her website about the Book of Esther that dovetailed with my recent musings about the role of Christianity in fiction. She notes that Martin Luther would have excluded this book from the Old Testament canon because it looks like a purely “secular” story. God is not mentioned anywhere in this narrative, as full of melodramatic coincidences as a Dickens novel, about how a heroic queen saved the Jews from persecution by her pagan husband. Shawna rightly takes a broader view:
If Esther is read historically and literally God can be left out all together. It is truly a book of coincidences. That is why we need Esther. To often we think that just because there is no obvious working of God in the world that God is not working. Esther’s discreet witness says otherwise.Read the whole thing here.
And we need these reminders. We need reminders that God working in our world is not always obvious—even to those in the church. We also need reminders that God uses harem girls to accomplish His purposes….
There are always those times in life when we wonder where God is. Esther reminds us that there are times that God is firmly behind the scenes, and we may not see how He has been working till well after what is taking place now. Part of our walk with God is realizing that God is with us regardless of circumstances or how we feel. The Jews had to have felt abandoned as they saw the decree that would take all of their lives. But seven years before they even realized they were going to need a deliverer, God had made sure a Jewish queen was in the palace. Even in the worst the world can throw at us, God continues to walk with us and provide ways of deliverance for His people. He walks with us through the messes as well as the celebrations.
The book of Esther seems to be driven by whims, accidents, and coincidence. But is it? The underlying, almost invisible, current running through Esther is that God is working His purposes out for the world—He can even use a harem girl and an arrogant, pagan king to do this. The book of coincidences is really a book of grace. In one of the most pagan places possible—the palace of a pagan king who does not even know that he has married a Jew, nor does he know that a decree has went out in his name to destroy his wife and her people, God is working.
Poem: “Poem Written in Glue”
Come, little fly, dear mouse.
Come, my edible baby.
Before desire dries like paint
on an old house, enter my cellar.
Lost in green bottles and paperback dust,
fungal soil, the lusty dark.
Here the models sail, still oceanless
in the docks of the shelves:
ironsides, galleons in grey
plastic monochrome as newsreels.
I could be made small enough for their wars.
Come too, before you are too dear
to yourself to climb
the rigging to a gambler’s height.
See how I have been patient as preserves,
slowly turning fruit to jewels,
jars glistening red as dreamgirl lips.
Your Main Street angel is coming unglued
from the damp magazine that lies
under years of outdated faces.
The shadows want to be your monsters again,
the twilight mirror a door
to where the china doll sleeps in her
spiderweb hair.
Come count all the homeless keys,
read me the missing leaves of books.
Come where the one who holds you
will never let go too soon.
published in the 2005 Kent & Sussex Poetry Society Competition booklet (4th Prize)