Author Archives: Jendi Reiter

Doubt Series, Part One: Insecurely Attached to God


In this season’s episodes of “Jendi discovers the obvious”, I want to look at some common secularist jibes at religion that I used to dismiss, but that are currently disrupting the faith I once knew:

“The Christian God is just a projection of believers’ relationship with their (real or ideal) parents.”

“I can’t believe in Christianity because Christians do bad things in the name of their faith.”

“The Bible’s moral, social, and/or scientific worldview is too primitive to be authoritative for us today.”

****

Today’s topic: If God is my parent, must I stay forever a child?

Tim Clinton, president of the American Association of Christian Counselors, and Joshua Straub, an adjunct professor at Liberty University (the late Jerry Falwell’s school), are the authors of God Attachment, a book that examines the psychological reasons why we do or don’t feel close to God. They summarized their research for CNN’s religion blog last month.

Attachment theory posits that the quality of our bond with our earliest caregivers influences our subsequent view of the world as a safe or unsafe place. Unreliable or abusive caregivers can foster a fearful, controlling attitude toward relationships later on. Instead of trusting that we are loved and our needs will be met by the person responsible for us, we may feel we have to compel their love through proper behavior or awaken their pity through self-harm.

Just as an insecurely attached child might believe that survival depends on manipulating their parent’s reactions, Christians with this kind of personal history might be especially drawn to legalism and superstition in their relationship with God the Father. Clinton and Straub write, “much of modern-day thinking about how to connect with God has been reduced to a theory of sin management — that what we do or don’t do in our daily lives is the gauge by which we measure why we are, or are not, close with him.” This reminded me of the unreasonable responsibility that abuse victims feel to “prevent” their abuse by predicting the will of a capricious spouse or parent.

Clinton and Straub go on to say:

If we don’t feel safe; if we are confused in our core beliefs about whether we’re worthy of love or whether others are capable of loving us or accessible when we need them, then we’ll transfer those beliefs onto God and struggle to believe he could really be there for us.

But if God serves the functions of an attachment relationship in our individual lives, it can be the difference between cognitively believing in God, as most do, and emotionally connecting, trusting, and walking with him every day, which is much less common.

If you came from a dysfunctional family and stopped reading now, you might be tempted to believe that it is impossible to have a genuine relationship with or healthy view of God. But the good news is that research supports the notion that those with insecure relationship styles can and do find a close, secure relationship with God as they turn to him and discover he is not like other attachment figures who have hurt them in life.

Perhaps it’s time to challenge our beliefs about God (if we’ve seen him as disinterested or unavailable) and re-evaluate our own identity (if we tend to see ourselves as hopeless or unlovable). Finding hope and meaning doesn’t happen overnight. There’s no magic prayer or verse that will heal the wounds we’ve experienced. We need to be honest with ourselves, grieve our losses, repent of our own wrongdoings, forgive those who have hurt us, and learn new relational skills.

Just like any other relationship, building intimacy with God requires vulnerability. Honesty. Time. Prayer. Focus. Listening. Journaling. Reading the Bible. Meditating.

Remember, the goal is to connect with God, and get to know him for who he really is. This often requires peeling off layers of false core relational beliefs.

When we understand our relationship with God in light of attachment research, we begin to realize how our unhealthy preoccupation with anxiety, fear, guilt, or self-punishment may actually be shutting out the love and healing we truly long for.

God is not like your mother, your father, your spouse, your ex, or any other human that failed, abused, or abandoned you.
…

In my life, the chief way that parents and mentors have messed with my attachment formation is by refusing me permission to grow up — the stage that Buddhist writer Philip Moffitt calls “initiation” in his profound essay Healing Your Mother (or Father) Wound:

It is through acts of initiation that you come to feel as though you are a valuable and welcome member of your family. As you develop, it is this function that provides the inner feeling that your life has meaning, and by the teenage years you understand that you have the right to become the full expression of your own unique life. It is also the initiation function that permits, accepts, and celebrates your leaving home to start your own life….

…When initiation occurs in a timely and clear manner, it is a beautiful process, though often painful for the parent. Most initiation takes place through symbols, rituals, and unspoken behavior. When it does not occur, there is a sense of guilt, of staying a youth, of not knowing or not feeling entitled to one’s place in life. For a mother to be effective in providing initiation, she must have somehow received or found her own. It is the most selfless of all the aspects, for she is encouraging a separation that leaves her without. This initiating power is associated with the shaman, the goddess, the magus, and the medicine woman.

In seeking initiation you may be attracted to teachers who claim superior understanding, who create an impression of having vast authority, thus signaling what is often a false claim that they can initiate. You may frantically want answers in your life, not understanding that initiatory power will come to you if you treat your questions as sacred. It is tempting to surrender your power to a teacher rather than seek a teacher who will initiate you so that you gain self-empowerment.

You may be caught in wanting to have energetic experiences on the cushion as a form of initiation. You may simply want something to happen in your life that signals your aliveness, meaning, and place. It is a call for initiation. It is much the same with teenagers who get tattoos, pierce their bodies, form cliques, posses, or gangs, and carelessly risk their lives and use drugs or fundamentalism of one sort or another to initiate themselves.

It is not realistic to expect a parent to provide all the initiation functions for a child. A parent only begins the process of initiation, which can be viewed as a series of lifelong developmental processes that are actualized through the use of rituals and sacred space by various spiritual and societal leaders.
…


Attachment to a parent figure is not a complete end in itself. It is also meant to give the child a safe base from which to explore the world, a goal noted by all the psychology texts I’ve read on this subject.

Unfortunately, it often seems that religious leaders want to cut off this exploration. Don’t entertain that idea. Don’t question that doctrine. Don’t allow history, science, personal experience, or your own moral intuitions to
inform and change your understanding of “what the Bible says”.

Attachment wounds happen for me in this way: Someone promises me love, community, righteousness, protection, and guidance, while instilling in me that I cannot survive without this support. I accept the support and grow strong enough to start using the gifts this mentor has given me to begin exploring on my own. At this point, the love is withdrawn and replaced by condemnation, the community is lost, and I find myself free but terrified, lonely, and angry that I was taught to be dependent in a world where there is no one to depend on.

Always before, in these situations, I would look to God, and re-learn the lesson that I’m justified by grace alone, not by pleasing human judges.

But swapping in God for my parents and teachers isn’t working anymore. I worry that looking for an attachment figure, even a perfect one like God, still keeps me in the mindset of a child who can’t survive without a caregiver. And let’s face it, eventually this will lead me back to looking for some human being to incarnate this relationship.

I’m a concrete thinker. That’s why I’m a Christian. I don’t trust abstractions that set themselves against and above experience. A spirituality of “just Jesus and me” is more likely to be a projection of my own ego, or a product of my active imagination as a writer. If I’m not seeing the face of Jesus in other people, I’m probably not seeing it at all.

So what would be a more mature way to envision my relationship with God the Father? Who does He want me to be when I grow up?

Truth is, I am mad at God for making me grow up because that’s always been the prelude to abandonment. How can I replace this learned response with a more trustworthy image of God from Scripture, tradition, and experience? Stay tuned.

What is a Covenantal Relationship?


Winning Writers subscriber Alvin T. Ethington is not only a published poet, but also the author of this eloquent argument for recognition of same-sex marriage in the Episcopal Church. (I’ll admit, he had me at “The Golden Girls”.) The article first appeared on FanStory.com, a good forum for emerging writers to receive feedback and enter members-only contests. He has kindly permitted me to reprint it below. Alvin tells me, “It proved to be very persuasive in the Diocese of Los Angeles, where same-sex blessings in many parishes now are a matter of course.”

What is a Covenantal Relationship?

by Alvin T. Ethington

On an episode of the television program “The Golden Girls,” Blanche, the woman who owns the house, discovers that she either has to make $10,000 worth of improvements or ask one of the three women who rent from her to move out. The house is not up to code for four people to occupy it. Whilst the women are in the process of discussing what to do, Dorothy comes up with the idea that Blanche can sell to her and the other women a portion of the equity in the house, thereby making the four co-owners. At first, Blanche is appalled by this idea—the house is one in which she lived with her husband, brought up her children, and spent most of her life. It is her family home. Later, when realizing she cannot ask any of her good friends to move out, she discovers her family has changed. Her husband is dead, her children are grown, and the people from whom she seeks support and with whom she lives in community are, indeed, the three other women who share the house. They are her family.

Our definition of family is changing. Adult children move back into the family home for economic reasons; sons and daughters choose to care for their elderly parents at home due to the high cost of medical care. Women have greater freedom in choosing societal roles; gay men and lesbians no longer have to keep the most important relationship of their lives secret. Children whose mother and father both work are often cared for by another relative or a friend; many families choose to adopt because of the large number of unwanted children in the world.

The nuclear family, which was engendered by the industrial revolution and which reached its apex in post-World War II white suburban America, is no longer the primary social unit it was once thought to be. For economic survival, women and men are choosing to live in groups of extended families and/or friends as they have in the past. Within these extended families and within societal communities, bonds of special relationships are being formed. Many people in these relationships of mutuality, love, and respect would like ecclesiastical recognition of what to them is of ultimate importance.

Some would argue that all this is the breakdown of Christian values in a societal context. I do not think so, for the message of Christianity is one of communal responsibility. The early Church provided for widows and orphans (Acts 6:1; cf. James 1:27). Whoever loves and serves Jesus of Nazareth by doing the will of God is his brother or his sister, a part of his family (Mark 3:35, Matthew 12:50).

Examples of covenantal relationships within the Christian community would be an older woman and man who have fallen deeply in love but whose financial situations preclude them marrying because of the concomitant loss of economic benefits that would bring, two lesbians or two gay men who have entered into a lifelong committed relationship, or adoptive parents who want to make a public pledge to bring up their children in the Church. (The Episcopal Church has started to recognize the last example in the 1979 Prayer Book rite “Thanksgiving for the Birth or the Adoption of a Child” which was previously limited to “The Thanksgiving of Women after Child-Birth.”)

Traditionally, the Church has recognized two kinds of covenantal relationships between persons — that of the promise the parents and godparents make to raise children in the faith and instruction of the Church at Baptism, and that of Holy Matrimony. These relationships are definitely sacramental. However, they have been developed and interpreted within the context of a Western society which has accepted the definition of Gratian for marriage — the union of a man and woman for procreation. Given the recognition that marriage has and can fulfill goals other than procreation and given the overpopulation of the world, it is expedient that we look to other definitions for marriage and for covenantal relationships.

The 1661/62 Anglican Prayer Book recognized that, although in its view, marriage is primarily for procreation, it is secondarily a remedy against sin, and tertiarily for mutual society, help, and comfort. Covenantal relationships which include a sexual component fulfill the goal of marriage to avoid fornication and all covenantal relationships fulfill the goal of mutual interdependence.

Is the Church in the process of affirming sexual sin in affirming covenantal relationships? These relationships only include a sexual component when the sex therein is other-concerned, respects the dignity of each person, and recognizes the partners as equals. Just as relationships of forced and non-consensual dominance and submission, of incest, and of rape break the covenant between parent and child or between wife and husband, so relationships which involve abuse of sexuality are not covenantal relationships. Covenantal relationships are inclusive of healthy sexual relationships, but not exclusive to them. Certainly the adoption of a child by a person does not include a sexual component.

Are these relationships sacramental? The Christian Church cannot agree on what exemplifies a Sacrament. If one accepts only the two Dominical Sacraments (Baptism and Holy Eucharist) as Sacraments, then these relationships are not Sacraments, but have a sacramental quality, as does marriage, for they are outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. If one accepts the seven historical sacraments as Sacraments, then these relationships do not have the Sacramental quality of marriage, but they do have the sacramental quality in which all of life is hallowed. A sacrament takes the simple things of life—water, wine, bread—and invests them with sacred meaning in the context of a person’s and a community’s relationship with God. Covenantal relationships are sacramental in that the two partners have made a commitment to themselves, to each other, to the Christian community, and to God to honor, love, and cherish each other. Because the sacramental quality of covenantal relationships involves two persons made in the image of God and the relationship between them, covenantal relationships are of a higher sacramental order than the blessing of an object. Covenantal relationships have a sacramental quality in that God is ever present in these relationships of love and faithfulness.

The Hebrews recognized this when they reflected on their relationship with God. They imaged their relationship with God in terms of covenantal relationships they knew and imaged their unfaithfulness to God in terms of covenant breaking they knew. God was the Father and Israel was His Son (Hosea 11:1). God was the Mother and Israel Her comforted child (Isaiah 66:13). When Israel was apostate, Israel “played the harlot” (Ezekiel 16:15, 16; cf.16:28); Israel was the unfaithful wife Gomer of the prophet Hosea (Hosea 1:2-3).

Jesus, as pictured in the Gospels, portrays his relationship to different groups in covenantal imagery. In the Q source material, he compares his relationship to the Jewish community of Jerusalem to that of a mother hen to her chicks (Matthew 23:37; Luke 13:34). The Johannine Jesus recognizes the deep bond of friendship between Jesus and his disciples (John 15:14-15).

The love poem Song of Songs has been interpreted to be exemplary of covenantal relationships. It illustrates the love of God for Israel and the love of Christ for the Church. What Jewish and Christian communities have done with this difficult text is to take the relationship between the two lovers and invest it with sacred meaning. God is ever present in the hallowing of special relationships.

Time moves on. The Church is required to be faithful to Scripture and tradition, but it is also open to the influence of reason and to the unfolding revelation of the Holy Spirit within the Church. We must stand in constant tension with and dialogue with society and affirm all persons on their spiritual journeys. We must not be afraid to speak out against sin, but we also must not be reluctant to recognize when God is present. Every good thing comes from God (cf. James 1:17). People are aching for spiritual recognition of their special relationships in a society in which the individual reigns supreme. We, as a Church, must comfort and succor those in this transitory life who daily face adversity. Where two people truly and authentically care about each other, where two people share joy and laughter, love and tears, sorrow and suffering, solace and comfort, life and death, there, indeed, is God.

Lisa Suhair Majaj: “Practicing Loving Kindness”


This poem is reprinted by permission from Lisa Suhair Majaj’s Geographies of Light, which won the 2008 Del Sol Press Poetry Prize. These poems give a voice to the Palestinian people, bearing witness to brutal loss, as well as the joy.

The title is a phrase that’s familiar to me from Buddhist teachings. Nonviolence and compassion for enemies are central to Buddhism and Christianity. Both religions also share an emphasis on justice. Whether you call it natural law, or karma, moral and immoral actions have consequences on a cosmic scale. The psychological challenge is how to have compassion for the oppressor without whitewashing oppression. I like the way Majaj’s poem balances both of these imperatives, the naming of the world’s evils and the aspiration to look for reconciliation instead of revenge. Gentle humor is an important tool for the peacemaker.

Practicing Loving Kindness

Bless the maniac
barreling down the one-way street
the wrong way,
who shakes his fist when I honk.
May he live long enough
to take driving lessons.

Bless the postman
puffing under the no-smoking sign.
(When I complain, my mail
goes mysteriously missing
for months.) Bless all those
who debauch the air,
the mother wafting fumes
across her baby’s carriage,
the man whose glowing stub
accosts a pregnant woman’s face.
May they unlearn how to exhale.

Bless the politicians
who both give and receive
bribes and favors.
Bless the constituents
seeking personal gain,
the thieves, the liars, the sharks.
And bless the fools
who make corruption easy.
May they be spared
both wealth and penury.

Bless the soldiers guarding checkpoints
where women labor and give birth
in the dirt. Bless the settlers
swinging clubs into teenager’s faces,
the boys shooting boys with bullets
aimed to kill, the men driving bulldozers
that flatten lives to rubble.
May they wake from the dream of power,
drenched in the cold sweat
of understanding. May they learn
the body’s frailty, the immensity of the soul.

Bless the destroyers of Falluja,
the wreckers of Babylon,
the torturers of Abu Ghraib
and Guantanamo Bay.
May they understand desolation,
may they comprehend despair.

Bless the peace makers,
the teachers, the word-workers;
the wavers of flags
and the makers of fighter jets.
May they know the ends of their labor,
and the means. May they make
reparations. May they rebuild.

Bless this planet, so cudgeled,
so bounteous: the rain forests,
the tundra, the ozone layer.
May it persevere beyond
our human follies. May it bloom.

Bless cynicism. Bless hope.
Bless the fingers that type,
the computer that processes,
the printer that prints.
Bless email and snail mail.
Bless poetry books that cross oceans
in battered envelopes,
bearing small flames of words.

Why Christians Can’t Recognize Christian Art


My current favorite God-blogger, Prof. Richard Beck at Experimental Theology, blogged last month about “The Thomas Kinkade Effect“, i.e. why does so much contemporary Christian art suck?

The visual art on sale in Christian bookstores is dominated by kitsch and sentimentality. Obviously, this stuff sells well, which means a lot of folks may be suffering from theological confusion. They see the “Christian” label as serving the same purpose as the health-sensitive labels on products at Whole Foods: gluten-free, cage-free, hormone-free, etc. In other words, they’re shopping for art that is safe for Christians. No unredeemed suffering, no sexually arousing stimuli, no challenges to the ideals of home and heterosexual family.

Beck is always ready to ask the tough questions. Where other Christian culture-makers might rest their critique at the level of packaging–we need higher-quality depictions of the same thing!–he is willing to investigate whether some cherished beliefs might have negative secular consequences:

What might be artistically compromising Christian aesthetic judgments? Many think a root cause is theological. Specifically, when Christian artists depict the world they must wrestle with how they portray the brokenness they find there. In light of God’s grace should the artwork depict the way the world should be or will be at the eschaton? Or should the artist depict the brokenness, woundedness and suffering of our current existence? Take, for instance, the work of one of the most recognizable Christian artists, Thomas Kinkade. Kinkade has said that his idyllic paintings are portrayals of the world “without the Fall.” But many Christian artists wonder if this impulse is truthful to human experience and the activity of God’s grace in a broken world….

….The argument is made that good art, to be truthful, must present grace in the midst of the Fall….true beauty isn’t achieved by willfully removing the signs of death,
suffering or brokenness. True beauty aims to find God’s grace in
unlikely and painful places.

As an example, Beck reproduces one of Tim Lowly’s paintings of his severely handicapped daughter, in which suffering is juxtaposed with the compassion and hopefulness of the six women who hold up her body, like pallbearers or worshippers around the effigy of a saint.

I agree that this kind of artwork is a great improvement over sugary depictions of praying hands and country cottages. But does the implicit requirement to “find God’s grace” still keep Christian artists on too short a leash? What about art that depicts still-unconsoled suffering (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”), speaking to those moments when we can’t yet see the silver lining in the mushroom cloud, and resent those “religious” friends who expect us to try? (Hello, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar…) Or art that expresses outrage at the suffering inflicted by Christians and Christianity? Is that still Christian art?

Apparently not, according to the Catholic League. And they got the Smithsonian to agree with them.

Kittredge Cherry, whose Jesus in Love blog features spiritual art with GLBT and feminist themes, has the story, which has also been covered in the mainstream media:

In an outrageous and unprecedented act of censorship, the Smithsonian Institution recently removed a video by gay artist David Wojnarowicz from exhibition after a few hours of pressure from religious and political conservatives.

Titled “A Fire in My Belly,” the video combines various images of loss, pain and death as a metaphor for the suffering caused by AIDS. The four-minute video was denounced as anti-Christian “hate speech” by the Catholic League because it includes a scene of ants crawling over Jesus on a crucifix. Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), the incoming House speaker, called it a misuse of taxpayer dollars.

The video had been on display at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC since Oct. 30 as part of the LGBT-themed show “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” the first national art exhibit about sexual orientation and gender identity in American art. Smithsonian president Wayne Clough decided to pull the video on Nov. 30, claiming that he didn’t want controversy to distract people from the rest of the exhibit.

A Smithsonian spokesperson said that this was the first time that the gallery has pulled an artwork from an exhibit because of complaints from the public….


Read more and view the controversial video here. I thought it was a powerful surrealist horror film as well as a prophetic critique of religion from within.

In my opinion, Wojnarowicz was not using Christian imagery as a cheap attention-getter. The religious references, such as the eerie soundtrack of a woman intoning passages from Leviticus about unclean body fluids, are directly relevant to the artist’s point that the church has contributed to the AIDS crisis by its ostracism of gays. I took away the message that AIDS patients are modern-day lepers and that Jesus suffers along with them. If we are scandalized by Christ’s entry into the experience of uncleanness and decay, we show ourselves to be the heirs of the Pharisees.

As Kitt observes, “By putting ants on a crucifix, it fits into the respected Christian
tradition of showing Jesus’ persecution and suffering on the cross in
grisly detail. Angry critique of religious institutions is also a
time-honored Christian tradition established by Jesus himself.”

I think that even the more sophisticated venues showcasing self-described “Christian art” would shy away from Wojnarowicz’s video because their gatekeepers are still thinking that Christian equals evangelizing. There’s no place in their catalog for art that depicts Christianity as the problem, not the solution.

However, that’s the kind of art that we as Christians particularly need to see. It can show us where we have wronged someone in the name of our faith, causing them to think of horror and decay, not love and grace, when they see the symbols that we wave around so proudly.

My Story “The Away Team” Now Online at The Adirondack Review


My short story “The Away Team” was one of three finalists for the 2010 Fulton Prize offered by The Adirondack Review, and is now online in their Winter 2010 issue. TAR is a well-regarded online literary quarterly published by Black Lawrence Press. This story is a chapter from my novel-in-progress. Spoiler alert: a character dies. Here’s the beginning:

The Away Team

They were my friends and I hated them. Four-thirty in the morning and Tomas was drunk, draped like a crumpled dress on the back seat of the van we’d borrowed from his boyfriend’s catering business. “It’s an Irish funeral,” he’d defended himself, to which Stan returned the predictable retort that Tomas wasn’t Irish, sparing me the effort of opening my mouth and releasing whatever sharp fragments of words still remained inside me. Then I saw Frank.

“You are not—you are not wearing that,” I groaned. His ensemble was complete, from his black patent pumps, to his Mamie Eisenhower belted black dress with pinhead polka dots, to the veiled pillbox hat perched on his crow-black waves of teased hair. Miss Anna Bollocks had stepped out of the nightclub shadows and was evidently expecting applause for deigning to wait with us in this alley where the West Village restaurant owners parked their delivery trucks.

“He loved me this way,” Frank replied, in Miss Anna’s voice, which was husky as his own but with the extra echo of an actor projecting to the cheap seats.

“You’re not the widow.” All my bitterness was turned on Frank. Hesitantly he unpinned the hat from his wig, sidled up to me and placed it on my head. I knocked it off and stomped on it. Only then did I see the kindness and pain in his mascara-crusted eyes. He’d given me what he had, like a child offering his teddy bear.

“Julian.” Stan touched my arm, a mild reproach. I wondered how long I could hold out without asking him for a Valium. At the very least I’d have to wait the six interminable hours it would take to drive from Manhattan to Pittsburgh, so I could spell Stan and Peter at the wheel. Frank had put himself out of commission with this getup. A drag queen driving a bakery truck is a temptation no highway patrolman should be expected to resist. Five miles over the speed limit and we’d become the clip du jour on Fox News.

Still, I apologized. “I’m going to need a new hat,” Frank pouted, but without real resentment. I helped him reattach the veil to his stiff pompadour, using the brooch as a sort of barrette. It was all a lost cause, anyhow. My nice black suit—Brooks Brothers, nothing too fashion-forward—wouldn’t make us any more beloved. They knew who we were. That’s why we hadn’t been invited.

Peter, the last member of our delegation, pulled up alongside the van in his compact Toyota. When he stepped out, I saw his eyes were red-rimmed and tired already. He’d meant to drive down from Albany last night but his boss, rookie Assemblyman Shawn Defalque, had kept him late at a staff meeting. Peter hugged me first and I welcomed the familiar collapse into his arms, till my body sensed that for once, he wouldn’t be able to hold me up.

In better days, Peter would get on our case for being flamers. He was the kind of queer that straights liked, the kind they didn’t notice, at least till he said what was on his mind, which he usually tried to do through someone else. Now he showed zero reaction to the circus in the alley, even when he saw the soot-smudged white van with the legend “Christopher Street Treats” over a sliced-open cherry pie. All he said to Tomas was, “Is it safe to leave my car in this spot?”

Tomas pulled himself upright with a flourish. “Safe? You lived in New York all your life and you want to know if it’s safe? Nothing is safe. Parking is…like God. It is a mystery.”

“Thank you, Stephen Hawking, now move your drunk ass so Peter can take a nap,” I said. Tomas climbed into the front passenger seat. Peter stretched out on the fold-out seat at the rear while Stan and Frank huddled together in the row behind me. The height difference between them was more noticeable when Miss Anna presented herself. Eye-level with her shoulder pads, Stan could have been the henpecked husband from an old comic strip. That was the problem right there. Take a picture of us, destroyers of manhood, pie-eating clowns, speeding down the highway to your big steel-hammering city, to your church. To mourn.

There was no place inconspicuous to park a catering van next to Our Lady of Sorrows so we ditched it by a supermarket a few blocks away. Full sun on the asphalt, a blazing, dusty day in June. Frank brushed on another layer of face powder. Peter straightened the boxy jacket of his off-the-rack suit, which, like everything else he wore, didn’t fit as it should. A big guy, he overcompensated by buying a size he could get lost in. I should have helped him; at some point, when we were bleaching piss-stained sheets, when we were wrapping my lover’s shivering body in hot towels from the dryer, feeding him his meals through a straw, there must have been a moment when we could have turned to each other and said, “So, what are you wearing to Phil’s funeral?”
…

****

Read the whole story here.
 

Two Poems by Paula Brancato


These poems are reprinted by permission from Paula Brancato’s newest poetry chapbook, For My Father (Finishing Line Press, 2010). Reviewing this collection in the Denver Examiner, Zack Kopp writes, “Her collection For My Father takes the intimate despair of an extra/ordinary familycentric reality tunnel and using the alchemty of creativity, tranfoms it to something profound and remarkable.”

The Plastics Man
(for my father)

I.

She wanted to say she loved him, as the hospital
   walls dissolved.
She wanted to tell him
about the boy she kissed once when he was
  in Korea,
but in a morphine haze
she slipped into that night of mermaids
  and moons.

Under the boardwalk, the sand cold, her
  feet bare.
It was my father she missed
but the boy with the clean shaven face was
  indisputably there,
the smell of citrus and his dark dank hair.
His hand brushed her cheek as their lips met.
  The sea

roared on and in the pain of my father’s absence,
my mother sat with the boy.
I could still be a ballerina, she wanted to cry.
  I could still
make babies. Most of all she wanted him,
  my father, inside, inside.
To fill this hollowness.

II.

“Everything is fine,” my father crooned
to soothe himself. She was fast asleep already.
  He looked down.
Something electric hit his heart and he dropped
  her hand.
The wedding ring was gone. This is not my
beautiful house… this is not my beautiful wife.

Then he remembered.
It was home in the jewelry box he’d bought
  her in Korea.
beside a small jar of cold cream, cover off,
capturing the last swish of her fingers.
“Everything is fine.”

He was holding her waist, so small, like the
  tiny dancing
girl inside the jewelry box, a ballerina, who
  twirled and twirled,
the tinny melody, the fullness of my mother’s
  hips under his hands,
the timbre of her voice, not low, not high,
in his dreams she always laughed,

my cries and the babbling of my brother,
  the tick-tock-tick
of the starburst clock in our hall, the dripping
  sink, dishes piled high, wet
clothes that flapped into the laundry bag.
  And footsteps.
The echoes of a family, no one there.
Every night, it was like that.

“Everything is fine.”
Every night she was here
in the sterile room.

III.

My father stood, dying for a cigarette.
He shifted his thoughts to his work,
because chemistry
was always easy, the titration he must make
  next morning.
The solution. How life was like a saturate,

a sudden crystallization from the falling of a
  final grain. Of the toughness,
the viability of petrochemical plastics. How capable
they were. My father was a “Plastics” man.
Using the handkerchief she ironed for him,
   he blew his nose,
wiped his eyes. She only saw his shadow then,

heard the faint hum of the machines, morphine
dripping into her veins. Drifting, she smelled the
  smell of him, her husband, traced his
lips in her dream. The salt of his skin, the starched
crispness of his collar, the heat of him
like an iron, the oily coils of his hair, faintly

mixed with the scent of tape and saline, the metallic
taste of the IV feed. The light was out: he’d
  turned it down.

IV.

Somewhere in the dark, a baby cried. It was her.
   She was the baby.
She was on someone’s knees, bouncing, an aunt’s,
   an uncle’s,
she was passed from hand to hand. There was
a bright beach ball, red, yellow, green, and laughter.
The ball, thrown with speed, flew toward her.
   Bigger and bigger.

She grew frightened, suddenly. It would fly
   in her face,
no one to stop it. It would obliterate
everything. “No, no, please, don’t go. Please!”
  she shouted.
Or thought she did. At the height of this eclipse,
  she tried
to sit up but her box of a body fell back.

V.

My father, hand on the doorknob, heard her moans.
“I’m here,” he said, and turned back.
But he wasn’t. He too was lost.
Thinking of the national athlete he once was,
   running the 440
around an asphalt track. The all-night lover
   he could have been,

given half the chance. The IBM
VP climbing into his Olds in Poughkeepsie.
   The Princeton scholar,
finishing his masters, my mother and brother
and I applauding, as photographers snapped
pictures and he alone explained how plastics

would save the world. The beautiful mistress Giselle
he might have had if he wasn’t a good Catholic
   and didn’t turn her down.
They would be in Peru or Fiji, stripped down
   in a bed, bathing
in the heat of one another. But at that moment,
there was only the honorable husband,

the benevolent father, the good son left to him,
the terror of raising me and my brother
   very possibly alone,
a piquant scent of hospital,
and the remembered touch of my mother’s sex
   the first time they’d made love,
her legs wrapped around him. He was gone,

though, of course, he turned
back and placed his arm under her shoulder.

****

Michael

They cannot go back. They can never go back. He is fifteen, fourteen, nine. She jumps him in checkers. He asks for her kiss. She gives him one black crown. He tosses his gum in, his baseball cards. For Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, she agrees. It is 1982. It is 1972. It is 1965. It is Coney Island. It is Rockaway Beach. It is Corona and the deli man. She tastes of coffee, cannoli, an octopus, sweet sausage and parmesan cheese. He tastes of ketchup, chocolate, salt and sand. Of boy, and not of man. It is Twiggy, the Pope, the Kennedy’s, lined up side-by-side. It is Elvis the Pelvis, Sid Ceaser, Cyd Charisse, Marilyn on Channel 5. The Last Supper hanging in the kitchen. A starburst clock in the hall. A Westinghouse refrigerator. Fathers spilling wine. It is prayer and haste and wait and waste. It is love and rosary beads. America kneels and beats the sheets. JFK has died. There are picnics and egg throws, barrel races, watermelon, pork chops, milk and Velveeta cheese. They compete as a three-legged team. He tucks his hand in her bathing suit bottom. When she punches his nose, it bleeds. There are mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and nanas and uncles and aunts. A handkerchief appears. There are bottle caps in the asphalt. Malcolm X and Martin Luther. A black boy in Harlem with a two by four. A phone that coughs up dimes. Two years out, the Harvard Business School Class of 1959. They sit on the stoop. He shows her his knee. She greedily picks the scab. There are young men dying, air raids, jungles, grasses whipping wild. There are joy sticks, airlifts, agent orange bombings, napalm blasts and body bags. Under a desk, she swears she is not scared. While the air raid siren wails, he holds her hand. He is seven and a half. She is eight and a half. There is a quiet lake in Alley Pond. He claims ten pollywogs, possibly speared. There’s a crooked stick, some mud, a rock, one submerged branch, some lick-em-aid. She twists off her shoes to hasten the crossing. She grabs his wrists, he hugs her hips. They rock. They sway. They fall. She is a grade ahead of him. He is a head ahead of her. He is seven. There are railroad tracks. There are party shoes and school uniforms. He takes her on a dare. She is seven. He is six. She is five. He is four. He draws a big red house, a woman, a man. She sketches in trees and daffodils using her left hand. He gives her a crayon, muddy green. She paints in the leaves on his trees. She is three. He is two. She has him by the hand. He holds tight to her knees. There is a big white bunny. A soft blue blanket. A teddy bear. Yours. No, mine. They cannot go back. They can never go back. White, pure white. Oh mother. Oh father. It is September. It is November. It is the year that Michael died.

First Sunday in Advent Non-Random Song: “Lo! he comes, with clouds descending”


The Episcopal Hymnal includes two musical settings for this Advent hymn written by John Cennick with later edits by Charles Wesley. My favorite is the one we sang in church this morning, the tune “Helmsley” by their 18th-century contemporary Martin Madan. It has a memorable complexity yet every phrase resolves in a way that makes sense.

In fact, I find it more of an unmitigated pleasure than the words, some of which can be troubling to a modern ear. I’m not so PC as to purge the worship service of all martial references. In my opinion, the Christian imagination needs both masculine and feminine moods, both the appealing vision of peace and the recognition that justice requires struggle.

However, I suspect there’s a veiled anti-Jewish polemic in the second verse: “those who set at nought and sold him….deeply wailing, shall the true Messiah see”.

When we sang these words today, I did some creative updating in my mind, recasting “those” as my fellow Christians who persecute others in Jesus’ name, profiting from hate. I’m still not sure that this is a completely skillful sentiment to indulge in, but as compared to the original interfaith hostility, it has the advantage of reminding us that we shouldn’t take Jesus’ approval for granted simply because we invoke his name.

Sing along (if you dare) at Oremus Hymnal.

****

Lo! he comes, with clouds descending,
once for our salvation slain;
thousand thousand saints attending
swell the triumph of his train:
Alleluia! alleluia! alleluia!
Christ the Lord returns to reign.

Every eye shall now behold him,
robed in dreadful majesty;
those who set at nought and sold him,
pierced, and nailed him to the tree,
deeply wailing, deeply wailing, deeply wailing,
shall the true Messiah see.

Those dear tokens of his passion
still his dazzling body bears,
cause of endless exultation
to his ransomed worshipers;
with what rapture, with what rapture, with what rapture
gaze we on those glorious scars!

Now redemption, long expected,
see in solemn pomp appear;
all his saints, by man rejected,
now shall meet him in the air:
Alleluia! alleluia! alleluia!
See the day of God appear!

Yea, amen! let all adore thee,
high on thine eternal throne;
Savior, take the power and glory;
claim the kingdom for thine own:
Alleluia! alleluia! alleluia!
Thou shalt reign, and thou alone.

Two Poems by Temple Cone


A sacred quiet permeates Temple Cone’s debut poetry collection, No Loneliness, winner of the 2009 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize. Abandoned barns are Cone’s churches; the steady rhythms of farm work, his liturgy. The birth of a daughter is both miracle and memento mori, a sweet paradox held together in an extended lyric poem that envisions poetry as a transmission of love across generations.

Temple has kindly given me permission to reprint these poems from his book. I had a hard time choosing just two favorites.

Mercy

Leaner than the gray French lops
I’d raised as a boy, the wild hare
I held in the August heat
was speckled yellow and brown
as old sandpaper, his pelt
worn to cussedness.
He lay twitching on asphalt
a minute after I swerved
and still hit him.
            I watched
his crazy dance to see
if he would rise, then gathered him,
trembling, into my arms,
one hand on his feather-quill ribs,
the other cupping soft neck.
Dumb luck, this. His eyes lolled
skyward, showed me
what to do. I whispered
some nonsense under my breath,
words to calm one of us.
The sparrow heart drummed in my palm.
I hadn’t forgotten how
to end life, could feel the old fracture
of knowledge in my bones.
So when he sprang free,
bounding to a roadside hedge,
I knelt down in the dust,
gaping at my torn shirt, marked skin,
stunned by how quickly
mercy could break from my hands.

****

  Bluesman

After his first descent to the underworld,
Orpheus didn’t die. The Maenads never tore him
apart like an offering of bread,
and the story of his head, singing
as the river bore it downstream to ocean,
is someone’s hopeful indulgence
in the persistence of song.
            What happened
to Orpheus happens to us all.
He wept. He cursed the animals who came
to comfort him, till the woods were silent.
In Thebes, he sold his lyre
and stayed drunk for days.
But the world doesn’t stop for myths,
so when the drachmas ran out, he found work
as a gardener. Kneeling hours in the dirt,
he’d talk to trellised morning-glories,
to the crocus and the daisies.
Of course, in time, he began to sing instead,
softly, and without knowing it.
The persistence of song. Then one day
he noticed the flowers following him
wherever he walked, and when he looked,
they didn’t turn away.

Two Poems by Ruth Sabath Rosenthal


Ruth Sabath Rosenthal’s poetry chapbook Facing Home has just been released by Finishing Line Press. As the title suggests, these frank and emotionally charged poems are about facing memories of the home we grew up in, as well as the homes that we as adults have made, broken, and re-formed. Rosenthal’s accessible writing style balances humor, anger, and compassion. She employs enough specific details from her own life to make the memories feel real, while staying focused on universal themes that will resonate with many readers. Some of her strongest work is about the complex feelings involved in caring for elderly parents who were emotionally unavailable to her as a child.

I chose the poems below for reprinting, with her permission. The extended metaphor of the porcupine is clever in its own right, but gains additional significance in the context of the more straightforwardly autobiographical poems–a sign of a well-constructed collection. As for “Zinnias”, I loved how she made the colors and textures of the scene come to life. My grandmother also slipcovered the good furniture in her Lower East Side apartment, and she also had a canary who died prematurely from the heat of the kitchen, though it wasn’t for lack of love–I’m told she let the little fellow fly all around the house, pooping where he wished!

Contemplating Caring for a Porcupine

A roof over its head, easily done.
Nurturing, quite another story.

Bathing — only with a long hose.
As for mealtime — the prickly thing

jumping up and down, impatient —
what protection would repel prick of quill?

What if the rascal was inclined to make
sport of that, then hide the mischief?

Get angry and chance an antsy porcupine
turning combative? Pay dearly for that;

or, if the critter contrite, savor the moment?
Or, having fed the robust rodent,

if it yelps for more but is on a diet,
what would distract? A game

of Hide and Seek might, though if
the quill ball should turn up missing,

how to know it would fare well, and
what angst to bear if the poor thing

was found to have been the dinner
of some known predator — when

all the poor porcupine wanted was more gruel,
and all I ever wanted was to care for it?

****

I Remember the Zinnias,

autumnal hues with bee-magnet centers.
In the planting, pearls of satisfaction
beaded Mother’s cheeks, made her glow
head to toe. Each summer, till first frost,
zinnias fringed the pathway to
the side door by our kitchen.

Mother loved her zinnias, their color rich
contrast to the dusty-rose brocade sofa,
aqua cut-velvet of Father’s chair —
both bound in clear-plastic slipcovers
that, in summer, made the backs
of our thighs stick to our seats.

When her new dining set arrived, keen
to keep it pristine, Mother moved Lucky,
my beloved canary, to the kitchen, to roost
inches from pot roasts simmering, the window
nearby rarely open — and, child I was,
I didn’t protest on my bird’s behalf.

Weeks later, just back from school,
I learned that Lucky had died
and Mother had given his cage away.
She claimed to have buried him
in her tomato patch, just feet
from her prized zinnias.

Thursday Non-Random Song: “We Lift Our Hearts in Thanks Today”


This selection from NetHymnal’s list of their top 50 Thanksgiving hymns was written by Percival A. Chubb (1860-1960) with music by Praetorius (1599). Sing along here.

We lift our hearts in thanks today
For all the gifts of life;
And first, for peace that turns away
The enemies of strife;

And next, the beauty of the earth,
Its flowers and lovely things,
The spring’s great miracle of birth,
With sound of songs and wings;

Then, harvests of its teeming soil
In orchard, croft and field;
But more, the service and the toil
Of those who helped them yield;

And most, the gifts of hope and love,
Of wisdom, truth and right,
The gifts that shine like stars above
To chart the world by night.

As we receive, so let us give,
With ready, generous hand,
Rich fruitage from the lives we live
To bless our home and land.