Category Archives: Faith and Doubt

Ellery Akers: “The Word That Is a Prayer”


Debates about the Word of God can preoccupy us so much, we forget that Christ’s real message, compassion, is much simpler but far from easy. That’s why I like this poem, reprinted here by permission from American Life in Poetry, a project of the Poetry Foundation.

American Life in Poetry: Column 312

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Ellery Akers is a California poet who here brings all of us under a banner with one simple word on it.

The Word That Is a Prayer

One thing you know when you say it:
all over the earth people are saying it with you;
a child blurting it out as the seizures take her,
a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital.
What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin:
at a street light, a man in a wool cap,
yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window;
he says, Please.
By the time you hear what he’s saying,
the light changes, the cab pulls away,
and you don’t go back, though you know
someone just prayed to you the way you pray.
Please: a word so short
it could get lost in the air
as it floats up to God like the feather it is,
knocking and knocking, and finally
falling back to earth as rain,
as pellets of ice, soaking a black branch,
collecting in drains, leaching into the ground,
and you walk in that weather every day.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©1997 by Ellery Akers, whose most recent book of poetry is Knocking on the Earth, Wesleyan University Press, 1989. Reprinted from The Place That Inhabits Us, Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010, by permission of Ellery Akers and the publishers. Introduction copyright © 2011 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

The Erotic Christ: Jesus in Love Blog Interviews Hunter Flournoy


This month on the Jesus in Love Blog, a resource for queer spirituality and the arts, Kittredge Cherry interviews Hunter Flournoy, a psychotherapist and shamanic healer who teaches “Erotic Body of Christ” workshops to help gay and bisexual men make a mystic, sensual connection with the divine. Here’s an excerpt. I was struck by the commonalities with Buddhism: the idea that the root of suffering is separation not only from God but from one another, and that we can attain transcendence by embracing the suffering of the world, not as self-punishment but as compassionate participation.

KC: Many LGBT people have been wounded by the false teaching that homosexuality is a sin. What message does the erotic Christ have for them?

HF: Our sexual energy is the most powerful tool we have to shatter the illusion of separation, which is what the original Christians meant by “sin.” The essential question we must ask ourselves is, am I using sex to bring myself alive, to overcome separation and incarnate the divine, or am I using it to medicate or avoid my own experience of being alive? This was the original understanding of chastity: it calls us to the highest possible relationship with our own sexual energy. All sexual experience can break down the boundaries and defenses we use to separate ourselves from each other and from God – we become one body, one being. Sex can also teach us how to give ourselves totally (kenosis) to each other, how to receive each other completely (plerosis), and how to surrender to the transfiguring power of our own erotic experience. As LGBT people, we also have an innate understanding that our erotic experience, our pleasure, desire, ecstasy, and union, can serve a purpose other than reproduction. Our erotic joy is a source of profound creativity, deep empathy, and a wild ecstasy that can take us out of who we are into a far greater sense of being.

KC: As you say, the idea of “suffering as Christ suffered” has been abused in legalistic religious systems. But gay bashing and other forms of “crucifixion” continue. How can the erotic Christ help in situations of real human suffering?

HF: There is nothing inherently spiritual or useful in suffering; it is useless to suffer as Jesus suffered. Nor did Jesus advocate cooperating with abuse and injustice. What he advocated and demonstrated – what really matters – is loving as he loved, embracing everything and everyone, including suffering, as Jesus embraced it. Instead of rejecting our suffering, trying to medicate, numb, get rid of it or distract ourselves from it, we learn how to embrace it, without indulging it or running from it. We let our suffering shatter our sense of self, our sense of control, and our need to make sense of the world. This is what the Christian mystics called katharsis. Second, our embrace transforms suffering into a searingly powerful erotic experience . . . it is like a fire that fills our whole being, a great trembling ache that breaks into the profound peace the mystics called theoria. Finally, we discover through this embrace that we are welcoming not only our own suffering, but the world’s suffering . . . we begin to experience ourselves as the world, as Christ’s body, and ultimately as God, in the mystery of theosis.


Read the whole interview here. Visit the Erotic Body of Christ website to learn more.

Anti-Colonialism and Gay Rights in Uganda


Dr. Jillian T. Weiss, a regular contributor at the GLBT news blog The Bilerico Project , recently posted a thoughtful article, “Understanding Uganda”, in which she explores why gay-rights activism directed at African countries often provokes an anti-colonialist backlash. Since gay people have existed in all societies, and were actually treated better in some African cultures before the advent of Christian missionaries, how is it that gay rights have been successfully branded as a decadent Western import? Weiss suggests that the Christian imperialist roots of African homophobia are now so old that they’ve faded from public consciousness, while secular human rights language is more immediately identified with NGOs run by privileged foreigners. An excerpt:

…Similar charges [of elitism] are leveled against large LGBT rights organizations that are disparagingly referred to by some as “Gay Inc.”, implying that they are out of touch with ordinary LGBT people and seek to promote an elitist and oppressive agenda. Another analogy is imagining a strong force of groups across the United States, well-funded by countries we generally dislike, attempting to put messages in the media that we ought to embrace human rights by giving up American democracy and going with a One-World-Government plan. Of course, these analogies are vastly different from the Ugandan situation, and I don’t mean to compare their specific facts, but only the motivations that can stir dislike even of those espousing human rights.

I recently spoke to an African scholar regarding this issue. While his expertise is in Ethiopia, and in particular the issues of development and sustainability, his knowledge of Africa is useful in this context. I asked him why it is that human rights movements, including the African LGBT rights movement, are viewed as colonialist encroachment on African identity, whereas U.S.-imported evangelical Christian homophobia is viewed as compatible with African identity. To me, it seems a sad contradiction.

His answer made it clear to me that the subtext of the LGBT rights movement for many Africans is that of foreign imperialism, a “Western corruption” not native to Africa. Christianity, to the contrary, despite its origins in missionary activities designed to indoctrinate the “savages” into compliance with European dominance by means of a fatalist philosophy of acquiescence, was introduced so long ago to Africa that its imperialist subtext is completely obscured. Its handlers have deftly messaged it as supporting African autonomy, sovereignty and ownership. They truly believe it is African, despite the fact that, as discussed by Eugene Patron in his Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review article, “Heart of Lavender: In Search of Gay Africa,” Africans have lived without discord with LGBT identities in the past, despite the efforts of Christian missionaries.

The history of post-colonialism is a reaction against oppression of autochthonous rule, particularly the successful attempt to neuter those who might be independent-thinking local leaders. As Matthew Quest has noted, anything that appears to imply effeminacy is often rejected by Africans as smacking of imperialism.

Thus, it is impossible to understand the state-supported open homophobia imported from the U.S. that likely killed David Kato without understanding that rights advocates in Africa are seen as imperialist agents bent on the destruction of a pure and strong Uganda identity independent of the imperialist West. All this is confirmed by the condemnation of Western leaders, ensconcing the homophobic Ugandan leaders with the mantle of defiance against the imperialists.

None of this is meant to excuse or condone the homophobia of Ugandan leaders, or the complicity of U.S. evangelical Christians who stoke these fires while wearing the mask of African independence. But the solution is not going to come from condemnation. This issue is shot through with the same thorny problems raised by the homonationalist movement. Though speak out we must at the murder of a brave rights activist who was unwilling to let his LGBT brothers and sisters continue to suffer, despite the known danger to himself, let us not fool ourselves that heaping condemnation will solve this problem. It adds fuel to the fire….


Gay Ugandan Human Rights Activist David Kato Murdered


Human rights activist David Kato of Sexual Minorities Uganda was brutally murdered on Jan. 26. Previously, Kato had received death threats for his advocacy on behalf of GLBT human rights. The Ugandan government is still considering a bill that would impose the death penalty for homosexual acts; the bill would also make it a crime to know that someone is GLBT and not turn them in. American conservative Christian leaders have been instrumental in drafting and promoting this genocidal legislation. Read more at Truth Wins Out.

Kato worked closely with Other Sheep, a courageous program of ministry to GLBT Christians in the developing world. It was he who invited them to establish a presence in Uganda. Read a tribute to him by Steve Parelli on the Other Sheep blog.

In a 2007 unpublished editorial that he co-authored with Parelli, Kato wrote:

…Integrity Uganda calls upon the Christian churches of
Uganda to reexamine the scriptures in light of the stories
of gay Christians of Uganda, the social sciences and
psychology. But, says Integrity, though the churches of
Uganda may not reexamine its theological position on
homosexuals, they must be clear on its teaching of
fundamental human rights and the liberty of conscience
when it comes to its official policy on gay rights.

The Christian doctrine of the liberty of conscience
teaches that no mere human authority – civil government
or religious institutions – has power to grant or to withhold
from men the exercise of freedom in matters of religion.
Homosexuality is a private religious matter between God
and the individual. Liberty of conscience teaches that it is
the individual’s inalienable right to exercise his judgment
without restraint in religious matters and to give
expression, freely and fully to his religious convictions,
without human dictation or interference. Not all religious
people believe homosexuality is irreligious, ungodly or
sinful. More and more, Christians in South Africa, Nigeria,
the Americas, Europe and other parts of the world are
changing their views on the Bible and homosexuality….

Protestants have historically taught that government is the
government of all the people and that government must
not put into law the doctrines of any one religion.

For government, the question of gay rights is a
fundamental human rights question only and can never
become a theological question. For the church, because
of the Christian doctrine of liberty of conscience, the
church is not to impose upon others its teachings on
homosexuality through government legislation….


I was tempted to file this news item under “Signs of the Apocalypse” because if there is an Antichrist, surely a sign of his reign is the hijacking of “Christianity” to justify killing people because of whom they love.

“Swallow” Gets Downright Eucharistic on Logic’s Ass


Martha Rzadkowolsky-Raoli has written a fantastic review of my chapbook Swallow (Amsterdam Press, 2009) for the Ampersand Books website. She’s reverse-engineered these rather difficult and prickly poems to make clear the theology behind them. The miracle of writing: when our readers mirror back to us more than we consciously realized we had said. I wrote Swallow by mad intuition, but an astute reader finds “method in it” after all. Some highlights:

Jendi Reiter created a tidy poetry book in which swallow means everything you can expect swallow to mean. She exhausts the word; its mashed remains a mix of cow meat, desire, intestines, bird. If you read the book, and you should, you’ll experience the beating of the word. Swallow. How else to learn something new ?(about the parameters of language) — – something only poetry can do, and these poems do it….

****

…By suggesting disparate contexts, these aphorisms maintain a collaged-world view. I like Reiter’s objection to a poetics bound by singular points of view. I like when word-artists comply with the rules of our new universe (a mess of sources coming at you from everywhere: billboards, email, the doorman). This kind of work feels real….

****

…Reiter’s rhetorical tricks can remind me of the riddle-ish catechism I was taught. The relationship between premises in these poems get downright eucharistic on logic’s ass. Mysterious pronouncements sound as zany as any church stories of body-magic: The body jesus lived in, the jesus body that is the eucharist, and the jesus body that you put into your body….


Read the whole review here.

You know you want it now:


Doubt Series, Part Two: Trust in (Some of) the Word(s) of the Lord


Trust. It’s an inference from the seen to the unseen, from the past to the future. Though “live in the moment” is the spiritual catchphrase of our supremely distracted society, trust tells us to do the opposite. This mood will pass, it says; this person or situation deserves to be seen in context, not judged on a surface reaction.

In order to learn from our teachers at a deeper level, we have to trust them. I first realized this when I took voice lessons in my 20s. Before then, I thought of my teachers as the people who gave me assignments, which I would figure out for myself, or decide not to complete if I didn’t consider them worthwhile. I really wanted to learn to sing, but unlike schoolwork, I didn’t even know what the necessary skills were or how to acquire them. My voice coach used a delightfully absurdist method that involved interfering with my normal control mechanisms (e.g. holding my tongue while I sang an aria as “glah glah glah”) to bring out the natural, relaxed voice. I couldn’t understand why this would work; all I could do was surrender to it, or not. Fortunately, I did. I not only learned how to sing, but how to trust.

Spiritual development happens the same way. All the human minds in the world, put together, can’t encompass the infinity of God. If we share our insights, though, we can get a bigger picture of God than if we each had to start from zero. Sometimes we can test others’ beliefs against our own experience, but (as with history, or science, or any other knowledge field) many times we also have to rely on second-hand reports.

The question is, which ones?

When I was preparing for baptism into the Episcopal Church, about 10 years ago, a conservative Catholic friend explained the magisterium to me as follows: The more we find that the Church has been reliable in areas of our direct experience, the more we realize we should trust the Church’s commands even when we don’t understand them so well. Later, Protestant friends would make a similar claim about the Bible.

For a long time, I was open to this, never to the point of believing in papal or Biblical infallibility (an incoherent concept, in my view), but generally feeling that as a Christian I ought to give tradition the benefit of the doubt. St. Paul’s words about grace in Romans 7-8 were lifesaving to me, and this encouraged me to hope that the rest of the Bible was infused with the same wisdom and power. Sure, I knew about the sexist, violent, tribalistic, unscientific, and plain weird bits of the Bible, but these were “a few bad apples”.

That was before I started hanging out with actual Christians.

My teachers in the faith were only human. They could have a gospel-inspired heart for the poor and a hardened heart toward unbelievers; a radically welcoming stance toward doubters and marginalized people and a smug liberal contempt for my “personal relationship with Jesus”.

But this complicates the issue of trust. Human psychology, like the Bible, being irreducible to a consistent philosophical system, it’s an oversimplification to say “Pastor X or Prophet Y was right about war, therefore he must be right about sexuality.”

Yes, the Bible is the place where I’ve found transformative forgiveness and comfort, and a vision of full equality for all people. It’s also the place where I’ve found condemnation of innocent people, and justification for oppressive social structures.

I’m at a point where I feel comfortable using the ethics of Jesus, as found in the gospels, to judge and prioritize all other Biblical texts. But then what remains of the Bible as a unified thing? The unraveling can be compulsive. I still read the Scripture passages each morning in the Daily Office, but with the mind of that combative high-schooler I used to be. I might like to believe the promises of vindication in the Psalms, for instance, but a little voice nags me that I have no basis for this, no reason to trust these words merely because they’ve historically been part of the same collection as other documents that I currently find convincing.

Oh, taste and see?
 

Charles W. Pratt: “Evening Meditation in a Cathedral Town”


Charles W. Pratt’s From the Box Marked Some Are Missing: New & Selected Poems (Hobblebush Books, 2010) is the most delightful poetry collection I’ve read this year, and I read many. The comparison that first springs to mind is Richard Wilbur, as both poets have more than ordinary gifts for writing formal verse that is light-footed, elegant, and full of surprises. Think of a Fred Astaire dance routine, or a Bach minuet: the underlying order is there, but never belabored on the surface. There’s no egotism or careerism in Pratt’s displays of skill. Not that I have anything against “confessional” poetry, but it’s also refreshing to read an author who echoes an earlier age, when poems could be reticent about personal details yet full of emotion.

From the Box… was the first volume in Hobblebush Books’ Granite State Poetry Series, which publishes authors with a connection to New Hampshire. Many of Pratt’s poems concern his work as an apple-grower, describing the farming life with humor, wistfulness, and reverence. There are also poems of family life, European travel, meditations on aging and and the mystery that lies beyond.

The poem below is reprinted by permission. This one stood out for me because of the mood, delicately balanced between modern empiricism and timeless wonder, and the intricate pattern of the rhymes. Note the deft double meaning of the closing line.

EVENING MEDITATION IN A CATHEDRAL TOWN

Transparent on transparency,
A lacewing on the windowpane.
Pale green traceries of vein
In the lancets of its wings sustain
A membrane too fine for the eye.
As tranquil on the mystery
Of glass as if taught by its wings
How to put faith in invisible things,
In slow sweeps back and forth it swings
Its frail antennae thoughtfully,
Like compasses that leave no mark:
Geometers imagining the arc.

In the cathedral treasury
I’ve gazed, unmoved, at the Virgin’s shift,
Draped like dead insect wings—enough,
The histories repeat, to lift
That heap of masonry so high.
Others believed in it; now I
Where the great stained windows raise
Their winged parabolas of praise
Day after day can bring to graze,
Sheepish, my agnostic eye.
Such precious straining of the light
Surprises stone and souls of stone to flight.

Small concentration of the evening air,
Lacewing, I look through you and glass to where
Beyond the fields the late sun condescends
To denseness, and its true brightness bends
And bursts to beauty where the transparent ends.

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.

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.