Category Archives: Book Reviews

Lose Your Life, But Don’t Forget to Find It


There are days when I can barely say the St. Francis Prayer that pops up at the end of the Episcopal morning prayer service. I say it with a lump in my throat, with mental fingers crossed, with my own revisions, if I say it at all. This is the famous prayer that begins “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,” and goes on to say, “grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love; for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.” And all the while my heart is aching for that more-than-human consolation, and for relief from the duty to appear compassionate, sane and cheerful no matter how difficult certain relationships become.

Callan frames this dilemma with her usual eloquence in a recent post about caring for her elderly depressed mother, who doesn’t accept Callan’s male-to-female transition:


Get the ego out of the way, say the Eastern masters. They don’t mention the part where you replace it with the will of a self-pitying narcissist, though many of the gurus, well, they do have their own sense of self.

Hope may be the thing with feathers, but a plucked chicken never has to worry about falling, though her life may be short, fat and consumable by others.


My theory has always been that classic Christian writing puts so much emphasis on shrinking the ego because theology was written by men whose main challenge was avoiding the pride and callousness that went along with their dominant position. For women, who are trained to take responsibility for others’ feelings even at the risk of suppressing our own, taking these teachings at face value can push us more out of balance. It’s interesting that Callan, raised as a man, has for a long time found herself in this typically female situation. Further proof that gender and personality don’t correlate as neatly as ideologues across the spectrum would have us believe.

In any event, her post reminds me of the main stumbling block I faced before I could become a Christian. All this talk of selflessness–didn’t that just put you at the mercy of corrupt human authority figures who were only too happy to prevent you from developing ego-strength? Well, yes and no.

The fools’ gold of Christian morality is a subtle form of works-righteousness that looks (to ourselves and others around us) like true humility. When we are afraid to say “no” to someone who has become a tyrant in our lives, we may think we are demonstrating unselfish Christian love toward them. But are we really doing what is best for them? If not, is it love that moves us, or merely the fear of being wrong?

Jesus said we lose our life in order to find it. If we’re not finding it, and the beneficiaries of our sacrifices also seem to be moving deeper into the prison of the ego and further away from the freedom of life in Christ, it’s time to consider whether we’ve let someone other than Christ be our master.

(A world of thanks to Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend, Christian psychologists, for their book Boundaries, from which the above insights were taken. This book saved my life and set me on the road to baptism.)

Nancy K. Pearson: “Thought Thinking Itself”


Nancy K. Pearson’s first collection of poetry, Two Minutes of Light, is the latest winner of the Perugia Press Intro Award. She has kindly permitted me to reprint a poem from her book below. Read more of her work and buy the book here.

Thought Thinking Itself

Suddenly, all the things I do not understand
discreetly twinkle below a surface.

A gristle of duckweed gleams through a thick chop of ice.
The green wafer of a fish drifts up through a pudding of eelgrass.

For 10 years, I lived mostly on psych wards & nothing burnished 
    more
than my overestimated connection to grief.

One year, my roommate consumed small amounts of arsenic 
    for a week.
Everyday, she stirred it through her warm brown soup.

Three blood transfusions later, she lit two portable charcoal grills
in the back seat of her Subaru & died.

We reassemble our lives & discover nothing.
Just under the skin, a tiny wick of green ignites a garlic clove.

In the early 1990’s, something went terribly wrong.
All around me, young women were diagnosed & diagnosed.

After a month on a psych ward, doctors discovered I had fifteen 
    personalities.
I was twenty. I made them all up. This is a true story.

If I could live my twenties again, I would not sever to untangle—
flight is a single ligament balanced between two forces.

In the snow, the geese link chains & I follow their past.
There is nothing at the end to unravel.

Dan Bellm: “Practice”


Dan Bellm is the author of the poetry collections One Hand on the Wheel (Roundhouse Press, 1999), Buried Treasure (Cleveland State University Press, 1999), and Practice: A book of midrash (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2008). His work has appeared in several anthologies, including Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry (Talisman House Publications, 2000) and The Best American Spiritual Writing 2004 (Houghton Mifflin, 2004). He has kindly given me permission to reprint the title poem from his new book below. I discovered Bellm through Image Update, the e-newsletter of the literary journal Image, which has an excellent review of Practice here.

Practice


Every seventh year you shall practice remission of debts.
Deuteronomy 15:1
How simple it ought to be, to practice compassion
on someone gone, even love him, long as he’s not
right there in front of me, for I turned to address him,
as I do, and saw that no one’s lived in that spot
for quite some time. O turner-away of prayer—
not much of a God, but he was never meant to be.
For the seventh time I light him a candle; an entire
evening and morning it burns; not a light to see
by, more a reminder of light, a remainder, in a glass
with a prayer on the label and a bar code from the store.
How can he go on? He can’t. Then let him pass
away; he gave what light he could. What more
will I claim, what debt of grace he doesn’t owe?
If I forgive him, he is free to go.

Re’eh, Deuteronomy 11:16–16:17


Read more of Dan Bellm’s poetry online at PoetryMagazine.com.

Book Notes: Undergoing God


A rarity among Christian apologists, gay Catholic theologian James Alison combines intellectual sophistication with personal vulnerability and sincerity, leaving the reader with the impression that he has truly staked his life on the beliefs he expounds. 

Alison is one of those authors whose writings all spring from a central idea. In his case, the idea is that we fallen human beings try to shore up our selfhood by defining ourselves against a scapegoated group, but Christ voluntarily took on the scapegoat role we are all trying to avoid, and thereby gave us a new identity as the people whom God loves. All comparisons among ourselves are revealed as idolatrous and insubstantial compared to our universal sinfulness vis-a-vis Christ, whose love gives us the courage to face this reality and not be undone by it.

In Undergoing God, a collection of Alison’s recent essays and lectures, he applies this paradigm to the controversy over gays and the church. A few of these essays are available on his website.

Below are some quotes from one of my favorites, “Wrath and the gay question: on not being afraid, and its ecclesial shape”. This piece, not included in the book, is a good introduction to his thought. Alison argues that both liberal and fundamentalist Christians wrongly pride themselves on their attitude toward the gay and lesbian “difference”. The truly Christian response would be to recognize our common humanity and deconstruct all conceptual schemes that make our goodness dependent on the creation of an Other, whether we affirm that Other or condemn him.


…I would like to trace with you the way in which there is both no violence in Christ, and yet the result of his coming includes violence. To trace the process by which “the wrath of God”, something literally attributed to the divinity in parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, becomes the anthropological reality known to Paul as “wrath”, and can even be referred to as “the wrath of the Lamb”.

Let me give you some background: in a classic lynch murder, such as that described in Joshua 7, where “All Israel” gathers against Achan and “stones him with stones”, the wrath of God is simply, and straightforwardly associated with the group’s loss of morale, and the subsequent build up to anger which turns them into a lynch mob. First the anger of God is detected in the collapse of morale, the melting hearts, of the sons of Israel who have just undergone a minor military defeat. So God provides Joshua with a lottery to determine at whose door responsibility for the defeat should be laid. When the lottery achieves its purpose of finding a suitable culprit, all Israel discharges stones, murdering Achan. In their very act of ganging up together, unanimously, against poor Achan, of whose guilt they convince themselves through the liturgical mechanism of the lottery, they create peace among themselves. And in that very moment when their stones are all discharged, then “the Lord turned from his burning anger” (Joshua 7, 26). Of course he did: the shifting patterns of fear and mutual recrimination which had riven the people have been overcome by their triumphant and enthusiastic unanimity. From their perspective it feels as though “peace has been given them”. This is, in fact, peace, in the way the world gives it, the peace which comes from unanimity in righteous hatred of an evildoer. But it is misperceived by the participants as peace flowing from the divinity thanks to the right sacrifice having been offered.

The power of this experience is very real, and can still be detected when human lynching has found its substitute in animal sacrifice. It appears that the role of the priest in early forms of atonement sacrifice was to cover the participants with the blood of the animal so as to protect people from the wrath. It was as though the blood sprinkled over them wove a huge protective covering against wrath. The Hebrew letters כפר from which we get “Yom Kippur” and our word “atonement” designate a form of covering. It does not take a huge stretch of the imagination to see that the freedom from wrath which came with the successful production of unanimity in the murdering of a victim, and which probably involved the participants being splattered with blood, could then be reproduced liturgically. The priest slaughters the animal, sacrificing it to the divinity, and then sprinkles the blood over the people, unanimously gathered to receive the fruits of the sacrifice. In the liturgical unanimity that occurs under the cover of the blood, the assuaging of the wrath is remembered and made newly present.

Interestingly, Israel does not seem to have stuck only with this model of sacrifice, but also had the very special Day of Atonement sacrifice where it was YHWH himself, through the High Priest, acting “in personam Yahveh”, who offered his own blood, symbolized by a lamb, for the people, who were then covered with it, this blood being taken to restore creation from the various forms of ensnarlments with which humans had distorted it. Here we begin to glimpse the notion of the victim performing the sacrifice for the people which will be brought to fulfilment in the New Testament….

****

…[Jesus] gives himself to the sacrificial mechanism in a way which the Gospel writers point to as being the way proper to the great High Priest, and he becomes the lamb of sacrifice. In fact, he reverses the normal human sacrificial system which started with human sacrifice and then is later modified to work with animal substitutes. Jesus, by contrast, substitutes himself for the lamb, portions of whose body were handed out to the priests; and thus by putting a human back at the centre of the sacrificial system, he reveals it for what it is: a murder.

Now here is the curious thing. It looks for all the world as though Jesus is simply fitting into the ancient world’s views about sacrifice and wrath. But in fact, he is doing exactly the reverse. Because he is giving himself to this being murdered, and he has done nothing wrong, he brings about an entirely new way to be free from wrath. This is not the way we saw with Achan, where the temporary freedom from wrath comes with the outbreak of unanimous violence which creates singleness of heart among the group. What Jesus has done by substituting himself for the victim at the centre of the lynch sacrifice is to make it possible for those who perceive his innocence, to realise what it is in which they have been involved (and agreeing to drink his blood presupposes a recognition of this complicity). These then begin to have their identity given them not by the group over against the victim, but by the self-giving victim who is undoing the unanimity of the group. This means that from then on they never again have to be involved in sacrifices, sacrificial mechanisms and all the games of “wrath” which every culture throws up. They will be learning to walk away from all that, undergoing being given the peace that the world does not give.

So, there is no wrath at all in what Jesus is doing. He understands perfectly well that there is no wrath in the Father, and yet that “wrath” is a very real anthropological reality, whose cup he will drink to its dregs. His Passion consists, in fact, of his moving slowly, obediently, and deliberately into the place of shame, the place of wrath, and doing so freely and without provoking it. However, from the perspective of the wrathful, that is, of all of us run by the mechanisms of identity building, peace building, unanimity building “over against” another, Jesus has done something terrible. Exactly as he warned. He has plunged us into irresoluble wrath. Because he has made it impossible for us ever really to believe in what we are doing when we sacrifice, when we shore up our social belonging against some other. All our desperate attempts to continue doing that are revealed to be what they are: just so much angry frustration, going nowhere at all, spinning the wheels of futility.

The reason is this: the moment we perceive that the one occupying the central space in our system of creating and shoring up meaning is actually innocent, actually gave himself to be in that space, then all our sacred mechanisms for shoring up law and order, sacred differences and so forth, are revealed to be the fruits of an enormous self-deception. The whole world of the sacred totters, tumbles, and falls if we see that this human being is just like us. He came to occupy the place of the sacrificial victim entirely freely, voluntarily, and without any taint of being “run” by, or beholden to, the sacrificial system. That is, he is one who was without sin. This human being was doing something for us even while we were so locked into a sacrificial way of thinking and behaviour that we couldn’t possibly have understood what he was doing for us, let alone asked him to do it. The world of the sacred totters and falls because when we see someone who is like us doing that for us, and realise what has been done, the shape that our realisation takes is our moving away from ever being involved in such things again.

Now what is terrible about this is that it makes it impossible for us really to bring about with a good conscience any of the sacred resolutions, the sacrificial decisions which brought us, and bring all societies, comparative peace and order. The game is up. And so human desire, rivalry, competition, which had previously been kept in some sort of check by a system of prohibitions, rituals, sacrifices and myths, lest human groups collapse in perpetual and irresoluble mutual vengeance, can no lo
nger be controlled in this way. This is the sense in which Jesus’ coming brings not peace to the earth, but a sword and division. All the sacred structures which hold groups together start to collapse, because desire has been unleashed. So the sacred bonds within families are weakened, different generations will be run by different worlds, give their loyalty to different and incompatible causes, the pattern of desire constantly shifting. All in fact will be afloat on a sea of wrath, because the traditional means to curb wrath, the creation by sacrifice of spaces of temporary peace within the group, has been undone forever. The only alternative is to undergo the forgiveness which comes from the lamb, and start to find oneself recreated from within by a peace which is not from this world, and involves learning how to resist the evil one by not resisting evil. This means: you effectively resist, have no part in, the structures and flows of desire which are synonymous with the prince of this world, that is to say with the world of wrath, only by refusing to acquire an identity over against evil-done-to you.

****

…[O]ne of the symptoms of “wrath” in our world, and it is indeed only one of the symptoms, and a comparatively unimportant one at that, is the emergence in the midst of all of our societies, whether we like it or not, of the gay question.

It is also obvious that one of the ways of dealing with this is to attempt to come up with some such formula as “look, we’re discovering that people we used to regard as weird and even evil are just different. But since they are functional to the way modern society works, just as we are, let us learn to live with our difference”. The key phrase here is “they are functional to the way modern society works, just as we are”. And this means that it is modern society, its structures of desire and survival, which get to run the show, because it is modern social structures, and their financial and corporate systems which get to determine what “likeness” is. And this means the “living with difference” isn’t really living with difference at all. It is really living with a sameness which is dictated by certain patterns of desire. And part of the way we protect ourselves against having to take seriously whether these patterns of desire really come from God, or are the pomps and splendours of this world, is by having decorative “difference” in the midst of all this sameness, and feeling proud of ourselves for being so broad-minded.

Well, I want to say: No! I am not at all interested in being given a post-modern identity which is in fact merely functional to the particular shape of wrath in our time. I am interested in becoming a son and heir to the whole of creation through the arduous discovery of my likeness with my sisters and brothers. I understand how it is one of the delusions of wrath that it is able to point to the growing visibility and public and legal acceptability of gay people and their lives and relationships and see this as an attack on the “family” and the “divinely given order of society”. But it is a delusion of wrath, like that of the Venetians against Shylock, because all it does is disguise from all of us quite how much the unleashing of desire which continues apace in our world, our capitalist, globalizing, technological world, does in fact subvert from within and change every form of relationship, including family relationships. It disguises from us how much we are all already run by these things, and how arduous it is for any of us to receive holiness of life, of desire, and of relationships in the midst of all this. And it sets things up for us to fight about this, rather than to help each other out of the hole.

****

…[W]hat Jesus is doing is very especially occupying the place of shame, and of wrath. And he is doing so in such a way as to detoxify it for ever. When he pronounces himself the Gate of the Sheep, he is referring to the gate by which sheep were led into the temple for slaughter. He indicates that the Good Shepherd does what the shepherds of Israel never did: he goes in as a sheep with the sheep into the sacrificial space. They are not frightened of him since they recognise that he is the same as them. The Shepherd is thus able to lead the sheep in and out to find pasture, something previously impossible. No one ever led sheep out from the Temple abattoir. It was as one-way a track as the railway line to Treblinka. Only one who was not affected by death could lead sheep in and out of the place of shame, wrath and sacrifice, so as to find pasture. So by himself becoming the abattoir door, the Shepherd makes the sacrificial space no longer a dead end, no longer a trap. He even points out how different this is from the thieves and hirelings, easily recognisable ways of referring to the religious and political leaders who ran the Temple and the system of goodness. Such leaders never went into the Temple through the abattoir door, but rather through another way, and then from above, they took the sheep for sacrificial slaughter (θύσῃ, John 10,10). But when there was any real religious crisis, whenever wrath threatened, or the wolf came, they could be guaranteed not to stand up for their sheep, not to dare to go through the same door as they insisted the sheep go, but rather to flee and leave the sheep to be scattered and the prey of every wild beast. And this of course is true of any system of goodness to this day, such as the ones which give sustenance to those of us who are “religious professionals”.

Well it seems to me that what Jesus is doing in “going to his Father”, “going to Death”, “occupying the space of shame and of wrath”, being both Shepherd and Abattoir door, is making the place of shame, of wrath, and of sacrifice into a pasture. And that means a place where we can be nourished, find wholeness, health and story to live by. The giving to us of the Holy Spirit is then the giving to us of the whole dynamic, the whole power, by which Jesus was able to occupy this place of annihilation, shame and wrath without being run by it. And this does seem to me something very powerful for gay and lesbian people. I wonder whether our ability to be able to sing one of Sion’s songs, to find that in our hearts are the highways to Zion (Psalm 84, 5) does not at the moment pass through our ability to be able to occupy the place of shame without being run by it.

This is a difficult notion, since shame produces flight. To be able to live in the midst of shame, by which I mean of course the space of shame which has for so long been so toxic, without being run by it may turn out to be a hugely positive feat. This is the space where, because one no longer has anything to lose, is no longer frightened, knows that the only thing left that they can take away is your life, and that is already in the hands of Another, because of all this, one can develop a tender regard for those who are like one, and a tender regard leads to a creative imagination, and a playful generosity of heart.

This is where I suspect that the Holy Spirit may be beginning to produce gay and lesbian stories which will turn out to be irrefutably Christian. Where Jesus has made us not ashamed and not frightened of occupying the space of shame. Where he has enabled us no longer to be run by the wrath which has so defined us in past generations, there we will be able to discover our likeness with those others who have needed us to occupy that position because it is the only way they think they can keep wrath at bay.

You see, I’m not sure that anything, any power at all can resist shame held delicately in tenderness. And I’m not sure that anyone can predict what creativity, gifts and life will emerge from such a peaceful place.

Stacey Waite: “XY” and “Finding My Voice”


Continuing this week’s Trans Pride theme, below are two poems from Stacey Waite’s chapbook love poem to androgyny, winner of the 2006 Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest. Thanks to M. Scott Douglass at MSR for permission to reprint. Stacey has just won another prestigious award, the Tupelo Press Snowbound Series, for her forthcoming chapbook the lake has no saint. Put it on your Amazon wishlist today.

XY

The doctor, who speaks slowly, after spending
quite a few moments to himself in his gray office,
says there is a strong possibility I am “chromosomally
mismatched,” which cannot be determined now
unless I pay for the test, because according to
my coverage, the test is not necessary due
to the fact that I am “out of the danger zone.”

The danger zone is puberty, when, he says,
“women like me” are at risk for developing
genital abnormalities. I look back at myself at 13,
staring at my body. And I think it might have
all made sense to me somehow, if my clitoris grew
like a wild flower and hung its petals between my thighs,
which were plumping up in that adult woman way.

The doctor is careful with me, knowing how my being XY
makes me a bad example of a woman, an XY woman
is an ex-woman, whose blood has been infected by Y.
The testosterone rising like a fire in her blood.
The doctor looks mostly at his chart, he wants me to disappear,
to put back, in order, his faith in the system of things.
He wants me to react correctly, to be ashamed.

I sit nervously in the paper robe, which covers only
the front of my naked body, the cold laboratory air
drifting up through the gown, my nipples hardening
like the heads of screws. He doesn’t know he’s given
me a second chance at my body. I think about the man
I could have been. I make a list of names and settle
on “Michael” after my father, who did not love me.

I imagine the girls in my high school I would have
been able to love. Michael could have saved me
from all of this, from the sound of my voice,
from the years of wearing someone else’s skin
in the form of a church dress. Michael
is the easier version of me.

When the doctor leaves me to dress myself,
I shove his crumpled up paper gown in the crotch
of my briefs. I cover my chest with the eye chart
and try to look for Michael. But he is not able
to be seen. He is out emptying the trash at the curb.
He is in me in the way that a man is in a woman.

****

Finding My Voice

When Dr. Rosen says he can “fix my voice,” he means
he will give me shots of estrogen that will surge through
my body like electric shocks, sending the hair on my chin
and stomach running for cover. He doesn’t want me to be warm.

He doesn’t want to listen to my large truck voice
fill his office like his soy milk
bursting up from his coffee’s deep bottom.
He wants to imagine me as an affirmation.

He wants me perched upon his plastic table
with my smooth naked legs, singing hymns
in the voice of a woman who needs him
in order to recover some piece of herself

that has been swallowed by the jaws of testosterone,
opening and closing hard like the doors of angry lovers.
He doesn’t exactly know that he hates me,
the feeling is more like gender indigestion,

how the sound of my voice keeps rising
up in his throat and he can’t rid himself
of the image of my lover who stretches out
nude in the dark bed, presses her hand
above my chest saying,

“talk to me, please, talk.”

Carl Phillips: “The Point of the Lambs”


Carl Phillips is a professor of English and African and African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His poetry has received numerous honors including the Kingsley Tufts Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. The poem below is reprinted by permission from his collection Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006.

The Point of the Lambs

The good lambs
in the yellow barn–the rest
housed in blue. By

“the rest,” meaning those who
–the guide explained–inevitably
arrive suffering. For

some do, he added.
Soft.
Serious. This–like

a new lesson. As to
some among us, it was,
it seemed. The usual

stammer of heart the naive
tend to, in the face of what finally
is only the world. What

must it be, to pass
thus–clean, stripped–
through a life? What

reluctance the mind
shows on recognizing
that what it approaches

is, at last, the answer
to the very question it knows
now, but

too late,
oh better to never to have never
put forward. What I

mean is we moved
closer,
in,

to the blue barn’s
advertisement–
flaw,

weakness. We
looked in.
Three days, four days

old. Few expected to
finish the evening it was beginning to
be already. And the small

crowd of us
shifting forward, and–
in our shifting uniformly–it

being possible to see how between
us and any
field rendered by a sudden wind

single gesture–kowtow,
upheaval–there was
little difference. Some

took photographs; most
did a stranger thing: touched
briefly, without

distinction, whichever
person stood immediately in
front of, next to. Less

for support than
as remedy or proof or
maybe–given the lambs who,

besides dying, were as well
filthy (disease,
waste and, negotiating

the dwindling contract
between the two.
the flies everywhere)–

maybe the touching
concerned curbing the hand’s instinct
to follow the eye, to

confirm vision. Who can
say? I was there–yes–but
I myself touched no one.

Janet Aalfs: “Facing the Wall”


Janet Aalfs is a former Poet Laureate of Northampton and the director of Valley Women’s Martial Arts. Her poetry collection Reach was published by Perugia Press in 1999. The poem below is reprinted with permission from her chapbook Full Open (Orogeny Press, 1996).

Facing the Wall

1. Someone found a heart

on market street not human
there’s really no cause
for alarm though a naked heart
warm on the sidewalk on halloween
is upsetting but not as bad as if
it were the organ of a valuable life
we don’t mean
one of the seventeen women found
strewn along desert highways
you can’t question whores their stories
aren’t reliable their lives aren’t stable
the reason we haven’t found a suspect
yet is that we can’t
get a straight answer out of anyone
and no one really knows
a slut she’ll go with whatever man
will take her you can’t trust women
like that to die when they’re supposed to
with their clothes on at a legal address
we think we’ve discovered the eighteenth

2. I want to know why

the fbi is so good at tracking down
bank robbers twenty years later charging them
with attempt to overthrow the government and
if the killer were out to slaughter corporation
presidents they’d nab him before he stepped
into the first lobby but they can’t find
a guy who hits on women one after the next
leaves them stripped to the bone
returns to his car job tv neighbors
like whoever left the heart on market street
now floating pickled in a hospital jar
silent as the eighteenth woman tagged
in a numbered refrigerator drawer no name address
important as she ever was
I want to know how that heart
arrived at market street who cut it out
of what body I want the names of every
thrown-away life engraved on a shiny
black wall then no one will be able to stand
anywhere in the world and not face it

Book Notes: Liberating Tradition


Kristina LaCelle-Peterson’s Liberating Tradition: Women’s Identity and Vocation in Christian Perspective offers a solid introduction to Christian feminism, and a wake-up call to the churches not to mistake culturally conditioned gender roles for gospel truth. Topics surveyed include the strong women of the Bible and their often-overlooked successors, from the female monastics to the 19th-century social reformers; feminine metaphors for God in Scripture; sex discrimination and body image; the diverse forms that marriage has taken in the Judeo-Christian tradition; and the egalitarian message of Jesus.

While at times I feel that Liberating Tradition goes in too many directions at once, this smorgasbord may be useful to conservative Christians who have not previously been exposed to basic feminist critiques of consumerism, for example. The book’s main strength is that LaCelle-Peterson backs up mainstream feminist-egalitarian arguments with detailed Biblical citations and historical evidence of women’s leadership roles in the church.

I was encouraged to see this book being sold at the recent Wheaton College theology conference, on the table of Baker Books, a leading evangelical publisher. As egalitarian perspectives become more reputable in evangelical circles, space also opens up for a more dynamic, historically aware method of reading Scripture, which hopefully can benefit other marginalized groups. It’s no longer plausible to say that we must replicate the family structures of first-century Palestine or else we’re undermining the authority of the Bible. Educated, active, Spirit-filled women, in numbers too great to ignore, are forcing the church to recognize that history and personal experience must inform our interpretive process, which means that our understanding of what the Bible says about women will change over time.

LaCelle-Peterson distinguishes herself from secular feminists and Christian complementarians, both of whom see the Bible and feminism as inherently incompatible. Instead, she argues that the Bible as a whole affirms women’s full humanity and equal participation in God’s kingdom. She does not take the liberal approach of throwing out texts that offend her politics, but rather contextualizes them and asks whether the “obvious” interpretation merely seems so because of the sexist cultural lenses through which we read.

God’s maleness, for instance, is not evident from Scripture. Compared to the other gods of the ancient Near East, who all had consorts and fertility rituals, the God of the Old Testament is strikingly non-gendered. Why do we assume that God is a literal “father” when this metaphor appears, but have no trouble perceiving the figurative language when God is compared to a stream of water, a rock, a nursing mother or a brooding hen? Since the God of the creation story transcends gender, “made in God’s image” applies equally to men and women.

After the Fall, hierarchy is introduced into the male-female relationship, with elements of oppression and unhealthy craving. Again, Christians have easily recognized that the other aspects of Adam and Eve’s new situation are a curse to be alleviated: “Are the items in Genesis 3 describing the state in which God wants us to live? For example, since God said farming would be difficult, does that mean using tractors is contradicting God?…Is it wrong for a woman to have epidural anesthesia in childbirth, since God said that women will have increased pain as they bear children?” (p.40) By contrast, we take Adam’s rule over Eve to be a moral norm, not a warning that their sin now taints all intimate relationships with the possibility of abuse of power.

In Jesus’ earthly ministry, we see God’s original plan for an egalitarian kingdom. Jesus validated Mary the sister of Martha when she assumed the posture of a male disciple, and provocatively ignored the purity taboos that would have kept him from healing, touching and speaking with women.

In a section titled “Discipleship Trumps Gender Roles”, LaCelle-Peterson adds, “It is interesting that Jesus also refuses to affirm positive traditional roles for women, even when asked to. Most significantly, unlike the tradition of some sectors of the Christian church, he does not put his own mother on a pedestal and value her simply for having borne him.” (pp.58-59) In Mark 3:33-35 (“Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother”) he takes an exclusionary status marker, one’s membership in a family, and makes it open to all who follow God. Women who fulfill traditional expectations as wives and mothers are no more privileged than their widowed, poor, or unpartnered sisters, including those with a checkered sexual history. Similarly, in Luke 11:27, Jesus proclaims that anyone, through discipleship, can be on a par with the woman who gave birth to him. “He isn’t putting Mary down, but raising the status of all the women in the crowd.” (p.59)

LaCelle-Peterson takes on the verses in the Epistles that seem to limit women’s participation, such as 1 Cor 14:33-35 (“women should be silent in the churches”). She notes that these lines occur within a discussion of how both men and women should behave decorously when they pray and prophesy, so that non-Christians will not be scandalized. It is assumed that women will be preachers and teachers (e.g. Phoebe and others in Romans 16). As many scholars now believe, 1 Cor 14 probably refers to women in the congregation who talked during the service, perhaps asking their husbands to explain the Scriptures, since women were not generally literate.

LaCelle-Peterson suggests that 1 Tim 2:11-15 (“…I permit no woman to teach or hold authority over a man…yet she will be saved through childbearing”) addresses a specific problem: female followers of Diana or other mother-goddesses who were proclaiming their superiority to men within the church. Saved “through” childbearing does not mean “by” (as in, salvation comes through being a mother) but “during”; God will bring them safely through childbearing, so they no longer need to hedge their bets by praying to Diana.

Anyone who’s cringed at the selection of pastel-tinted “Christian womanhood” books in a Lifeway bookstore, or sat through one too many John Eldredge lectures on how men naturally long to be rescuers and women to be rescued, will appreciate LaCelle-Peterson’s deconstruction of gender stereotypes that have been picked up by the evangelical marketing machine and reinforced with so-called divine authority. Consumer culture teaches young girls that their self-worth depends on being pretty, delicate, and unthreatening. Gimmicks like Revolve, the Bible packaged as a teen fashion magazine, misdirect Christian girls’ energy toward externals rather than internal spiritual maturity. It would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous.

One of the most helpful sections of this book is its tour through the many manifestations of marriage in Biblical times and beyond. What Christian conservatives call the “traditional” family, with the man working outside the home and his wife staying home to raise the children, is an artifact of 19th-century capitalism. Before industrialization, husbands, wives and children often worked side by side on the farm or in the artisan’s workshop. Both parents were involved in teaching the children the skills they would need to carry on the business.

However, when capitalism turned men into salaried employees of a large corporation, women’s non-cash-based labor became devalued and invisible. It was a sign of upward mobility if your wife could afford to stay home. This meant that the woman became an ornament to the male ego rather than a contributor to society. That pride-based arrangement doesn’t sound like the model of mutual submission we read about in the Epistles, still less the actual patterns of discipleship in the early church. Yet today’s conservative churches have uncritically
adopted a commercialized vision of gender roles as if it were based on natural law.


To me this suggests the dangers of an ahistorical reading of the Bible. Human beings are inescapably embedded in history, both enriched and constrained by the specifics of our time, place, and material interests. When we are afraid to contextualize and move on from the social arrangements that happened to prevail in New Testament times, because we are seduced by an impossible dream of an “objective” social order that stands outside historical contingency and fallibility, we also lose perspective on our present-day social arrangements and how they unconsciously shape our hermeneutics. 

Liberating Tradition contains many more useful arguments from history and Biblical criticism than can be summarized in this review. By necessity, LaCelle-Peterson limits her focus to women’s heterosexual relationships and church leadership roles, but the logical extension of her critique of gender is unavoidable. Having admitted, in any context, that the meanings of maleness and femaleness are historically variable — and having recognized that our fallen nature easily converts difference into inequality, contrary to the radically inclusive vision of Jesus — we cannot honestly say “marriage is between one man and one woman” without admitting that most of the important words in that sentence are ambiguous, including (pace Bill Clinton) “is”. Will the female pastors and theologians in today’s conservative churches, who owe their leadership roles to feminist readings of the Bible, speak out against heterosexist idolatry, or will they pull the ladder up after them?

M. Lee Alexander: Poems from “Observatory”

I’ve recently finished M. Lee Alexander’s poetry chapbook Observatory, published last year by Finishing Line Press, and found it to be an insightful and enjoyable book. Clear-sighted, modest and wise, the narrator of these poems takes us to London, China, Japan, and post-Katrina New Orleans, always with an eye for the moments of common humanity that open up intimacy between strangers. Below are two of my favorite poems from this collection, reprinted by permission.

Dress Rehearsal

Theatre in the Round

My father dyed
his hair red for the Claudius Play
(or so I called it, wanting him
to be the star–till mom told me
he was a bad guy–then I cried
and called it Hamlet). He would
come home from rehearsal

orange-headed, my father and yet not
my father, almost like a clown I watched
him practice falling. We went to see
the make-up place before the play where
mom said, It’s OK, the knives aren’t real,
but my father reaching for his rust-stained 
    comb
dropped the stageprop dagger, and 
    his toe bled.

I got to stay up late that night,
look down through shining dark
to watch Claudius rolling over,
my father and not my father
on the wooden O stage below.
His crown slipped down
and his head lay bare and still.

Now flying from Orly into O’Hare, where
the river’s dyed green for St. Patrick’s Day
and the stores are full of Shamrock hats,
I’ve been called home to the funeral 
    home
too late to watch Claudius rolling over,
my father and not my father,
his hair not even gray.

****

Thrift Store Elephants

Seeking a mystery for my journey
in the thrift store next to Union Station,
passing rows of bric-a-brac I saw scattered
an army of elephants, someone’s precious
collection, the alabaster white-jade figurine
the first to catch my eye, then the teakwood
one with broken tusk, and on another shelf
a plastic Dumbo, porcelain calf and mother
touching trunks, a Babar figurine, one cruelly
carved of ivory, all cast about the shelves
among the candles, mugs, and shards of 
    former lives.

Hard to think of a happy reason for their 
    presence,
unlike children’s clothes and toys outgrown–
someone labored years to assemble this herd
and would unlikely give it up without a fight.
I began examining each one in turn, wondering
    which
had been the first, the last, or the most beloved,
which the souvenir from the trip of a lifetime.
The clerk passed, saw me handling them, said
    Those came
from our Hospice box, we get some lovely things
    from there.

I longed to take them home to a place of honor,
somehow let their donor know they’d been
    admired,
but knew a dozen fragile ornaments to be 
    a foolish
addition to a traveler’s pack. Yet strewn across
    the aisles
hated to think of them going one by one to
    different homes,
maybe gathering dust for years, so I collected 
    them again,
cleared a broad space on a lower ledge and set
    them in
a festive circle tail to trunk, found nearby a carousel
    music
box and placed it in the middle, wound it up, in hopes
the circus animal parade might catch some younger eye,
a child might bring them home as newfound treasures,
maybe start a new collection round them, finding
    joy as
their first owner had by adding to their numbers by year.

Then forgot all about the elephants until I returned
from my trip a few weeks later, stopped in and saw
they’d gone, music box too. Hoped they went together
or at least in groups. On the way out saw the
    broken-tusk
bull tossed into a box of rags, took him home and named
him Hannibal, because he’d borne a war upon his back.

Poet Steve Fellner on the Joys of Insignificance; Pat Strachan on When Not to Edit


Poet Kate Greenstreet blogs at Every Other Day, where she’s compiled an archive of over 100 interviews with contemporary poets about the road to first-book publication and how it changed their life (or not). I especially treasure these tongue-in-cheek words of wisdom from Steve Fellner, whose book Blind Date with Cavafy won the 2006 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize:


I had been sending my book out for many years, and I was crazy determined to get a book of poetry published. I got an MFA and PhD in creative writing. During all this time, I was sending out various incarnations of the book. No one wanted it. It was (and still is) an uneven book, but there were a lot of worse books out there, and I liked sending things out in the mail. Even when you get a rejection in the mail (and I got a zillion of them), it’s always fun to have opened the envelope. It’s like watching the Oscars. Even if the actor you love loses, you at least enjoy the spectacle.

I knew my book would never be accepted by a huge press, but I was completely comfortable with the idea of being insignificant. Still am. The world is nice that way: no one holds insignificance against you….

It’s hard to get readings when your book comes from a small press and you’re an insignificant writer. Again I don’t mean insignificant as pejorative. Most of us are. There’s comfort in being insignificant: you’re free to do what you want; no one is watching you. In fact, I want to write an essay, a meditation about the power and positive consequences of being insignificant. There’s so much pressure to matter in the literary community. This isn’t to say there shouldn’t be significant writers who win major awards, but aren’t there any other alternatives to aim for?

I have a friend who is a significant poet and he’s working on his second book. Occasionally, I’ve watched him work, and he is constantly looking at his first book when he writes poems for his second. He wants to make sure his new poems are as good as the first. If I were a significant poet, I would engage in this behavior. But I don’t, because no one is watching me, and as a result, I don’t need to watch myself as closely. To draw an analogy, if you are a beautiful person, the world expects you to leave your house looking attractive, well-groomed. If you’re a person like myself, no one cares if you leave the house wearing dirty socks or if you have a stain on your shirt. You’re free. Significant poets and beautiful people shoulder a great deal more responsibility than the rest of us.

Fellner also encourages authors not to lose confidence in their own vision, with one exception:


I also find it sad that I read so many young poets are constantly changing their manuscripts after not placing in a contest. When everything is so oversaturated and so many contests are run by committee, taking your losing to mean anything is dangerous. Having been a screener for contests, I can say that I’ve seen so many manuscripts look overlabored. You need to let go of your manuscript. There’s only so much you can do.

Unless you have a bad title. Here’s an embarrassing confession: for years I sent out my manuscript and never placed. I called it the dumbest, dullest things! Aesthetics of the Damned was one. Hoaxes and Scams was another.

As soon as I called it Blind Date with Cavafy (all the poems were basically the same ones that appeared under the other titles), I started being named a finalist. And I won pretty quick. After many, many years of bad titles. This is my theory: most screeners, most poets are insecure in making aesthetic judgments. The mention of Cavafy made it clear that I knew something about poetry. The humor of the phrase “blind date” juxtaposed with the literary allusion signaled I was a poet. I am very embarrassed to admit this, but I think it’s true. There’s so much out there, and most people are tentative, they need clues that they’re giving the right book the award. That isn’t to say this is why I won, but I did notice that I started making it past the initial rounds much more often. Choose a smart title. Most titles suck. They’re boring and pretentious and vague.

Read the whole interview and a sample poem from Fellner’s book here. Find out about Marsh Hawk Press’s contest and other new titles, and sign up for their e-newsletter, here.

On a related note, I was heartened by these comments from legendary editor Pat Strachan (formerly of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, now at Little, Brown) in an interview in the latest Poets & Writers:


Q: Do you have any sort of guiding philosophy that shapes your editing?

A: Not a guiding philosophy, but I do think it’s extremely dangerous to mess with a novel structurally, because it’s close to poetry in that it’s almost pure consciousness. The way it comes forth from the writer is the way it should probably be, even though maybe the beginning is unclear or not enough action happens in this part or whatever. With a literary book—I hate to say literary, but a piece of serious fiction that isn’t genre fiction—I try to stay away from structural suggestions because they can be very damaging. One big change can make the whole house of cards fall apart. So with literary fiction I really try to stick to line editing. I also think the less done the better, and I consider myself a fairly heavy editor. But I do as little as I can do, because a work of serious literature is a very fragile construction.

I personally have something of a schizophrenic relationship to editing. As the editor of the Winning Writers newsletter, one of my tasks is selecting subscriber poems to feature in our “critique corner” with revision suggestions and possible markets for their work. However, as a writer, I have always belonged to the Howard Roark school of aesthetics: I’d rather blow up the building than incorporate someone else’s changes to the blueprint.

This rugged individualism is harder for me to maintain now that I’ve shifted from poetry to the novel. I can see all sides of a poem, whereas a novel is too big for me to get my bearings. It’s the forest rather than the treehouse. So I’ve begun seeking out advice, both about my work-in-progress and about the craft of fiction generally, which often leaves me more confused than before. How do I know whether someone else is right? Sure, she’s a reader, but is she my reader? Would she naturally pick up the type of book I’m writing, if we didn’t know each other? On the other hand, if I’m more selective about whom I ask, aren’t I predetermining the result by seeking out people whose answers I can predict?

And so once again I find myself between the Scylla of legalism (must get the RIGHT ANSWER!) and the Charybdis of radical doubt.