Author Archives: Jendi Reiter

Sunday Non-Random Song: Whitney Houston, “The Greatest Love of All”


I was grieved to learn today that pop diva Whitney Houston died this weekend, at the young age of 48. Sadly, like many brilliant performers, she struggled with addictions and unhealthy relationships.

Her hit song “The Greatest Love of All” was a favorite anthem of mine in the 1980s. The theology of this song may offend some Christians, as too redolent of the “cult of self-esteem”, but personally I believe that you can’t hate yourself and love God at the same time. He made you, didn’t He? Was He wrong? Accepting yourself as lovable is a necessary part of believing that God loves you, not merely as an idea but as a lived psychological reality. Also, a certain amount of self-love protects you against making an idol of religious teachers, who can be a great help in proper perspective, but shouldn’t substitute for your own knowledge of God inside. Sometimes the Spirit will “lead you to a lonely place” where you must “find your strength in love”.

Sending God’s love to you, Whitney, wherever your soul’s journey takes you…



9th Circuit Rules Prop 8 Gay Marriage Ban Unconstitutional


The 9th Circuit, the federal appeals court based in California, today upheld the trial court’s ruling that California’s Proposition 8 was unconstitutional. This referendum, narrowly passed in 2008, stripped same-sex couples of the right to marry. Here’s a quick summary from the San Francisco Chronicle’s website:

A federal appeals court declared California’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional today, saying a state can’t revoke gay rights solely because a majority of its voters disapprove of homosexuality.

In a 2-1 ruling, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said Proposition 8’s limitations on access to marriage took rights away from a vulnerable minority without benefiting parents, children or the marital institution.

“Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples,” said Judge Stephen Reinhardt in the majority opinion…

…Reinhardt, joined by Judge Michael Hawkins, pointedly refrained from deciding whether gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry. Instead, he said Prop. 8 violated the Constitution because it was rooted in moral disproval of gays and lesbians and withdrew rights they had won less than six months earlier, when the state Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage.

Their narrowly framed ruling would apply only to California, if upheld on appeal.

In dissent, Judge N. Randy Smith said Prop. 8 must be upheld if there was any reasonable basis for its enactment. For example, he said, Californians could have concluded – rightly or wrongly – that children were better off with married, biological parents, and that limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples would encourage responsible child-rearing.

But the court majority said prohibiting same-sex marriage does not encourage opposite-sex couples to marry or raise children.

Read the rest of the article here.
Read the court decision here. The appeals court decided the case more narrowly than the trial court, which had ruled that gays and lesbians had an affirmative constitutional right to marry. The 9th Circuit found that Prop 8 did not pass even the lowest standard of review, namely whether there was any rational basis for the law to advance a legitimate public purpose. This standard does not require the court to treat gays and lesbians as a specially protected class.

The case now heads to the Supreme Court.

Tupelo Press Poets Talk About Their Faith


The Poetry Foundation website has posted a substantial excerpt from a forthcoming essay collection from Tupelo Press, A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith. This volume, edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler, gathers reflections from 19 accomplished poets about spirituality and the craft of writing. Here are a few choice passages to encourage you to read further. The book can be pre-ordered now and will be released in March.

Jericho Brown:
“Hope is the opposite of desperation—it’s not as comfortable as certainty, and it’s much more certain than longing. It is always accompanied by the imagination, the will to see what our physical environment seems to deem impossible. Only the creative mind can make use of hope. Only a creative people can wield it.

“Today I believe that anything one visualizes consistently becomes reality. Isn’t that what prayer is? Maybe that means my beliefs have not changed at all: lift every voice and sing till earth and heaven ring. I am a believer. True believers see their way as the way. That doesn’t mean I can’t stand someone else’s way. It means that I am capable of joyfully getting lost in my own. Spirituality is important to me because I think there is something among us greater than the physical, something we know exists and can address directly. I love God. I love liberty. I shame one if I lose the other. I think of God now as way more patient than I could ever be. I have to believe that God is better than I am, and better than all of us. That’s the only thing that could make God God.”

Kazim Ali:
“Prayer is speaking to someone you know is not going to be able to speak back, so you’re allowed to be the most honest that you can be. In prayer you’re allowed to be as purely selfish as you like. You can ask for something completely irrational. I have written that prayer is a form of panic, because in prayer you don’t really think you’re going to be answered. You’ll either get what you want or you won’t. It feels to me like that, a situation where you’re under the most duress. Often people who are not religious at all, when suddenly something terrible happens, they know they have to pray. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. We all engage with the spiritual at different points. Prayer is not a refuge or shelter so much as it is an opening of arms, an acceptance of whatever storms exist in the world. You don’t really pray for your situation to change, you pray to be able to handle your situation. It’s not the world you want to change; it’s you that you want to change.”

G.C. Waldrep:
“Most Americans, I think, compartmentalize, because it is convenient: we find our modern lives intolerable otherwise. Now I am a teacher. No, now I am a consumer. No, now I am a parent, a man of faith, a poet, an investor in off-shore oil drilling, etc. It tears the soul. Even a serious faith commitment can become simply one more compartment.

“The Anabaptist conception of faith, on the other hand, is encompassing. Whatever one is doing, one should be doing it with a spiritual aim and value, hopefully in some connection with the life of the body, which is the church. It may seem inconvenient, but our lives are united and made complete in Christ, and in the community and fellowship of fellow Christians. Of course I know (non-Christian) poets who feel the same way about their art, about the community of work and feeling that poetry convokes. When I am someplace like the artists’ colonies of Yaddo or MacDowell, I tend to hear quite a bit about this. But for me, poetry inheres within the whole defined by Christ, His Word, and the church.

“Prayer is that which conveys a message to God, who is either known or knowing, more or less by definition. Poetry is that which conveys a message to a stranger.”

Joy Harjo:

“Incantation and chant call something into being. They make a ceremonial field of meaning. Much of world poetry is incantation and chant. The poem that first made me truly want to become a poet was sung and performed by a healer in Southeast Asia. As he sang and performed the poem he became what he was singing/speaking, and even as he sang and spoke, his words healed his client. When I saw that in the early seventies on a television program, the idea of what it meant to be a poet shifted utterly for me.”

Gregory Orr:
“I have faith that when the emotional, imaginative, and spiritual life is activated inside a person, when one becomes fully human, feeling and caring deeply, this represents a resurrection of some kind. This happens for me often when I read poems or hear songs. The feeling of being moved represents a resurrection. Every time meaning or feeling flows into your experience, that’s resurrection. I choose to believe that this has something to do with the beloved. One of the perils of being human, and of lyric poetry, is narcissism, the solipsistic sense that the self is all there is. Likewise, one of the perils of trauma is extreme isolation of the damaged self. To me, the beloved is that figure that exists independent of the self, that figure that calls us into relationship with the world and saves us from what I consider the emotional, spiritual, and psychological error of solipsism and narcissism. The beloved calls us out into connection with the world, into reciprocal relation with the world.”

Jane Hirshfield:
“No one undertakes something as difficult as Zen practice because they already feel the perfection of ‘things as they are.’ We humans turn toward a spiritual practice in part to restore ourselves from some felt form of separation or exile. We feel something is wrong, or missing. This is not my usual vocabulary, but one of my poems, ‘Salt Heart,’ has a passage that may be relevant here: “I begin to believe the only sin is distance, refusal./All others stemming from this.” Separation from others, separation from self, are close to the root of suffering. Christians might say ‘separation from God,’ Sufis might say, ‘separation from the Beloved.’ Jung might call it a failure to recognize all parts of the psyche as parts of one self; that shadow-self, refused, grows perilous. Buddhism proposes that the separation of selfhood itself is a mistake of the mind, an attitude in some way reflected in our English use of the word ‘selfish.’ While Zen is the particular practice that drew me, I certainly don’t believe there’s only one ‘right’ spiritual path—if something is true, it will be findable anywhere, and there are as many spiritual paths as there are people, and probably sparrows and frogs and pebbles as well. Still, for me, this not uncommon sense of being exiled from full presence in the world brought me to both Zen and poetry.”

I Don’t Know What I’m Talking About


“Truth is I thought it mattered. I thought that music mattered. But does it? Bollocks! Not compared to how people matter.” (Chumbawamba, “Tubthumping“)

I used to think theology mattered.

Because, for a long time, I understood ideas better than people…

Because I hated how it felt when certain authority figures didn’t trust my word, and played armchair psychoanalyst to accuse me of motives I didn’t possess…

Because I saw the suffering in the lives of friends who acted on impulse, and who never sought the guidance of tradition about what was moral and good for human flourishing…

Because I experienced emotional chaos and “gaslighting” in my family and unchecked bullying in my peer group…

…I overestimated the importance of explicit, conscious beliefs, as compared to subconscious beliefs and psychological patterns, as determinants of people’s behavior.

…I imagined there could be a system of thought that would make people humble and trustworthy, and insulate their community against abusive dynamics, if only they properly understood and thoroughly implemented those beliefs.

…I cared too intensely about establishing a community where everyone agreed on the fundamental facts and values–one where each individual was not stuck inside her private and uncommunicable “true-for-me”. Though I didn’t realize this for years, that politically correct liberal ideal was triggering memories of being in a relationship where my pain was not visible to the other person and her version of the facts was impervious to correction.

…I needed the privacy afforded by abstraction, when talking about matters that were close to my soul. (This is still somewhat true, and will be the subject of a follow-up post if I ever find the time.) Theological discussion, unlike the personal sharing that goes on in Christian small-groups, allows people to connect via their common passion for knowing God, without exposing personal vulnerabilities that the other person may exploit to attack your theological position. Again, I did not realize right away that this was my concern; under the lingering influence of Objectivism, I was more likely to dismiss personal factors as irrelevant, rather than simply unsafe to reveal indiscriminately.

Why am I writing about this? First, to apologize for being a self-righteous bunghole in any of my past theological screeds. Second, because I don’t think my particular sore spots and accompanying defenses are all that unique.

Based on my recent explorations of trauma theory, I think it’s safe to say that at least 10-25% of any congregation has an abuse history or some other serious traumas in their past and/or present. The ones who are temperamentally inclined to resist rather than reenact the chaos of their past may well be drawn to fundamentalism (religious or otherwise).

Be compassionate to these people. Not in a patronizing or intrusive way, but in your own heart. Understand that their “attachment to views”, as the Buddhists would say, may have been a life-preserver when their attachments to other human beings were disrupted by loss or betrayal. Call them out (discreetly) when their ideology or methods are hurting others, but first establish a safe space, founded on God’s grace, for them to face their faults.

If you want them to believe that people matter more than theology…first show them that they matter to you.

Two Poems by Louie Crew


The poet Louie Crew (a/k/a “Quean Lutibelle”) is an Emeritus professor of English at Rutgers University, and a widely published advocate for GLBT Christians in the Episcopal Church. He has kindly permitted me to reprint the two poems below, which were recently featured in issue #99 of Caught in the Net, a poetry newsletter from the UK-based writers’ resource site The Poetry Kit. Thanks also to The Poetry Kit’s Jim Bennett for permission.
Check out Louie’s list of recommended poetry publishers here.

Don’t Hang Up

Don’t hang up,
I’m not a heckler.
I NEED your help
but I can’t tell you my name.
I’m in a phone booth
while mom buys groceries,
so I won’t take long.
I heard your talk show
and I’m scared. Last summer,
when I was just thirteen,
I balled with a guy
I met at the bus station.
Now I’ve got these purple spots
all down my stomach.
I drink five shakes a day
and I have lost fifteen pounds
in just three months!
I’m afraid to go to our doctor
cause he’s my dad.
He’d beat the shit out of me
for liking guys.
Can you tell me somebody else
to call?
Cripes! Here comes mom. Bye!

****

Fay

My one earring stores my powers.
It charms my lover into bed.
Worn aisle-side on buses and trains,
   
it reserves me a double seat
    until all others are filled.
On campus it keeps me off all
   
but the most enlightened committees.
It is 99% foolproof in protecting me
   
from wasting time on racists.
At times it has made otherwise sane folks
   
dangle from dormitory windows to giggle,
   
“Where’s your husband?”
Worn with a cap and gown, it wards off
   
any threat of Respectability.
In class, it assures that students question
   
what I say and not vainly agree
   
because of who said it.
In church, it has made stranger priests
   
spill me a double portion of the Mass….
When I take it off, people take me
   
for any other mortal.

Massachusetts Considers Punitive “Three-Strikes” Law


Even as pressure builds in California to overturn their “three-strikes” criminal sentencing law, the Massachusetts legislature is trying to slip a similar bill under the public’s radar. Three-strikes laws impose harsh mandatory minimum sentences for repeat offenders, regardless of the seriousness of the third crime. Thus, for instance, a person with two prior felonies can be sentenced to 25-to-life for a nonviolent offense such as drug possession or petty theft. My pen pal “Conway” is one victim of this system.

This unreasonable policy has contributed to such severe overcrowding in California prisons that the US Supreme Court recently ruled that conditions there violate the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Why would we want to bring this problem to Massachusetts?

A letter that ran Tuesday in our local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, eloquently makes the case against this proposed law. It was authored by Leslie Walker, the executive director of Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts, and Lois Ahrens, the director of The Real Cost of Prisons Project of Northampton.

Unless recent legislation that fast-tracked both the Massachusetts House and Senate is slowed down and reconsidered, Massachusetts prisons will rapidly move into the ranks of the most overcrowded and expensive in the nation.

The two “Three Strikes and You’re Out” bills, which passed in the final moments of the November legislative session, will make a bad situation worse.

Look at two examples:

MCI-Concord, meant to hold 614 prisoners, is jammed with 1,345 men for a 219 percent occupancy rate.

MCI-Framingham was meant to hold 388 women and now houses 445 – a 115 percent occupancy rate.

Worst of all is MCI-Framingham’s Awaiting Trial Unit, where 215 women who have been convicted of no crime are crammed into a space designed for 64 – more than 330 percent the intended occupancy.

The number of prisoners in Department of Correction custody is at an all-time high. Overcrowding averages 143 percent over capacity. The corrections department has reported that parole releases have dropped by 56 percent in 2011, mostly due to parole practices and policies promoted by the Patrick administration. Even without the new law, Massachusetts faces increased corrections costs of approximately $100 million dollars a year.

An analysis performed on sentencing data provided by the Massachusetts Sentencing Commission illustrates how costly implementation of a “Three Strikes” law would be to taxpayers: an annual burden of between $75 million to $125 million could be added because between 1,500 to 2,500 prisoners could be sentenced to life with parole.

This means that the commonwealth will have to build new prison space at a cost of $100,000 per cell since our prisons are far beyond capacity. We are already paying $1 billion a year simply to incarcerate men and women, with each costing taxpayers almost as much as a year’s tuition at one of the Valley’s private colleges – approximately $50,000.

We will also keep paying the annual costs to house the same prisoner over and over because the current system is too strained to take steps that might keep prisoners from committing another crime – only 2.4 percent of the corrections department budget is spent on programming.

Education – the more one has, the more effective it is – has been proven to be one of the most successful ways of keeping people from returning to prison, but like other programs proven to rehabilitate, it is hampered without funds.

The chance for a Massachusetts prisoner to leave crime through such programs is nearly zero.

The current “Three Strikes” bills are not cost effective because they are too broadly drawn. For example, the Senate version of the bill sweeps in nonviolent convictions and mandates the third strike maximum punishment even if the previous cases were not serious enough to require a sentence of more than a day in jail. The bills would not allow judges to consider how long ago the offenses occurred or any mitigating circumstances. This would continue to overfill our prisons.

No government official wants to be labeled as “soft on crime.” But officials in other states have advocated for smart prison reform that have saved millions for taxpayers and increased public safety.

Malcolm Young, of Northwestern Law School’s Bluhm Legal Clinic, writing in The Crime Report notes, “Several states are moving ahead with carefully researched plans and strategies grounded in “best practices,” bent on reducing prison incarceration and corrections costs. Among them are Ohio, South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi.”

These and other states, like New York, Michigan and New Jersey, have also reduced their prison populations with shorter sentences for nonviolent crimes, elimination of mandatory minimums for low-level drug offenses and creative alternatives to prison. The result is hundreds of millions of dollars in reduced corrections spending and lower recidivism rates.

If the current “Three Strikes” bills pass, we’ll be wasting millions of dollars while doing nothing to cut crime in Massachusetts – and continue to crowd prisons. Forget education. Forget rehabilitation.

Without such tools, those we sentence to prison will get out with even fewer resources than they have now and that means compromising the public’s safety. We urge legislators to take several steps back and consider the consequences of the hurriedly made and costly decisions which will be with us for decades.

To get involved, visit www.smartoncrimema.org. Write or call your state representatives (see House and Senate websites to find your legislator’s contact information).


Hermann Hesse: “Stages”


This graceful poem by Hermann Hesse offers permission to let our beliefs evolve as we acquire new experiences and capacities. It feels like a good introduction to the new year, and to a hoped-for series of blog posts about how my understanding of Christianity has changed during my shift from a guilt/forgiveness framework to a trauma/recovery framework for organizing my experiences.

Text courtesy of the Poemhunter website, which unfortunately does not give the translator’s name.

Stages

As every flower fades and as all youth
Departs, so life at every stage,
So every virtue, so our grasp of truth,
Blooms in its day and may not last forever.
Since life may summon us at every age
Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor,
Be ready bravely and without remorse
To find new light that old ties cannot give.
In all beginnings dwells a magic force
For guarding us and helping us to live.
Serenely let us move to distant places
And let no sentiments of home detain us.

The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us
But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.
If we accept a home of our own making,
Familiar habit makes for indolence.
We must prepare for parting and leave-taking
Or else remain the slave of permanence.
Even the hour of our death may send
Us speeding on to fresh and newer spaces,
And life may summon us to newer races.
So be it, heart: bid farewell without end.

Cindy Hochman: “Self-Portrait in a Concave Knife”


When the Big C meets the Big D, all you can do is laugh. At least, that’s where poet Cindy Hochman’s survival instinct takes her. Packed with more puns than a Snickers bar has peanuts, her chapbook The Carcinogenic Bride (Thin Air Media Press, 2011) brings energetic wit to bear on those modern monsters, breast cancer and divorce. She kindly shares a sample poem below. To order a copy ($5.00), email Cindy at poet2680@aol.com. Hat tip to Gently Read Literature for bringing this book to my attention.

Self-Portrait in a Concave Knife

Here comes the carcinogenic bride!
Here comes the survivor-in-chief!
Wanna see my balance sheet?
This will be my Checkers Speech!
There goes my stale mate
We once lived in an altared state
He cleaned my slate, I cleaned his plate
Here is love in fission
body in remission, missionary position
Here is my inner elf,
     
my quirky self, my non-existent wealth,
      in sickness and in health
Here are my hickeys, my hearses, my hoopla,
   my histrionics
Here is my whole hierarchy of hernias
Say some Hail Marys and kenahoras
For tumors come and gone.
Here is the lion’s share, my blonde hair, my thin air,
   my health care.
Ass-kisser, go-getter, phone-dodger, night-
  blogger, flip-flopper, vow-breaker
Here is my Chinese fan
Here is my oil can
Here is my Yes We Can!
Here is my bellyflop, my pet rock, my co-op, my
 writer’s block
     my Last Supper
     my Mea Culpa!
Here are my brittle bones, my mortgage loans
My dulcet tones, my low moans
Here is my picket sign, my witty line, my glass of
  wine (or two . . .)
Here is my income tax, my credit max, my panic attacks
Here is what I’ve held in escrow:
     my pens, my posse, my potbelly
     my strokes and daggers
Here is my handle
Here is my spout
     my gamin face, my apocalyptal pout
    
cranky bitch with perfect pitch
Here is my tea rose, my stuffy nose, my broken
  toes,
my spiritual quest, my daily stress, my scarred
  breast
Here’s to my every OY,
My utter JOY
There’s my life through a poetic prism
(or maybe just my narcissism)

Reiter’s Block Year in Review, Part 2: Best Fiction


For me, there are two things that take a good story to the next level of greatness: fully human characterization, and a connection to wider moral-philosophical themes. And not just any themes. I want a narrative that is aware of tragedy without being defeated by it. A narrative that values equality and diversity, and hints at how we can move in that direction, without glossing over the contrary impulses in every human heart. Throw in an appreciation of art’s power to undermine dehumanizing ideologies, connect it to God somehow, and you’ve got me hooked. The books below were not only my favorite novels of the year, but will also be favorites for years to come.

Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (first published in 1980; expanded edition from Indiana University Press, 1998)
Imagine the Bhagavad-Gita as a Punch-and-Judy show. What do the legend of St. Eustace and particle physics have in common? In this unique novel, part mystical treatise and part fantasy-horror fiction, two millennia have passed since a nuclear war knocked Britain back to the Iron Age, and a semi-nomadic civilization has preserved only degraded fragments of our science through oral tradition in the form of puppet shows. Our narrator, 12-year-old Riddley, at first joins forces with a shifting (and shifty) cast of politicos and visionaries who hope to bring the human race back to its former glory by rediscovering the recipe for gunpowder. But soon he’s on the track of bigger game: the nature of reality, and the causes of sin. Which is more fundamental, unity or duality? Why does Punch always want to kill the baby?

Vestal McIntyre, Lake Overturn (Harper, 2009)
This standout first novel paints a tender, comical portrait of an Idaho small town in the 1980s, where a motley collection of trailer-park residents yearn for connection (and sometimes, against all odds, find it) across the barriers of class, sexual orientation, illness, separatist piety, drug abuse, and plain old social ineptness. You’ll want to linger on the luscious writing, but keep turning the pages to find out what happens to the characters who’ve won a place in your heart.

Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Random House, 2000)
This Pulitzer-winning epic novel about the golden age of comic book superheroes is also a love song to New York City Jewish culture in the years surrounding World War II. Two boys, a visionary artist who escaped Nazi-occupied Prague and his fast-talking, closeted cousin from Brooklyn, lead the fantasy fight against Hitler by creating the Escapist, a  superhero who is a cross between Harry Houdini and the Golem of Jewish legend. However, their real-world dilemmas prove resistant to magical solutions, and can only be resolved through humility, maturity, and love.

Diane DiMassa, The Complete Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist (Cleis Press, 1999)
Warning: castration fantasies, uppity women, cruelty to morons, and unapologetic feminist rage at rape culture. But our gal Hothead is about so much more. In her own traumatized, over-caffeinated way, she’s on a quest for healing and love–even if sometimes the only person she can trust is her beloved yoga-practicing cat, Chicken. This graphic novel will win your heart if you stick with it.

A Christmas Thought


Coming home from Midnight Mass last night, as I gazed up at the stars that shone brightly in the crisp cold atmosphere, I had the thought that there were two ways to interpret this sight. Intellectually, I knew that I was seeing immense orbs of fire burning light-years away, dwarfing our little planet, not to mention the quiet street where I stood. Emotionally, though, I felt that the canopy of stars was a cozy and hopeful sign for us down below, a celestial response to our joy.

What a miracle, I thought, that the earth’s atmosphere is made in such a way that we can see these faraway lights. How kind of them to stoop to communicate with us!

So too with the Christ child. God is infinitely powerful and huge, the creator of those stars and galaxies whose scope we cannot imagine. Yet God also comes down to us, offering us a way in, a point of connection that is on the scale of the human heart and mind.

Come, Lord Jesus.