Category Archives: Faith and Doubt

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.
 

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.

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.

A Psalm by Lakota Chief Yellow Lark (1887)


For the past few years, our church youth group has made an annual pilgrimage to the Borderlands Education and Spiritual Center in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Along with hikes and ceremonies to help them encounter God in nature, the teens learn about Christian settlers’ oppression of the Native Americans, and potential spiritual common ground between the two cultures today.

Last week we heard about their transformative journey in a Sunday morning service that incorporated Lakota music and prayers. This poem was read in place of a psalm. I particularly like how it strikes a balance between personal tranquility and concern for the wider world (“help me find compassion without empathy overwhelming me”).

Oh, Great Spirit, whose voice I hear in the winds.
And whose breath gives life to all the world.
Hear me! I am small and weak.
I need your strength and wisdom.
Let me walk in beauty, and make my eyes
Ever hold the red and purple sunset.
Make my hands respect the things you have made.
My ears sharp to hear your voice.
Make me wise so that I may understand
The things you might teach me.
Let me learn the lessons you have hidden
In every leaf and rock.
I seek strength, not to be greater than my brother.
But to fight my greatest enemy, myself.
Make me always ready to come to you
With clear hands and straight eyes.
So when life fades, as the fading sunset.
My spirit may come to you without shame.

The Episcopal

Kahlil Gibran on Death


Tonight, on Halloween, we will be in our old Victorian house by the graveyard, luring little children with candy so we can put them to work doing Winning Writers tech support. Maybe we’ll even watch “Rocky Horror” on Netflix, because we’re too Brad-and-Janet to go to the theater with all those icky people throwing toast.

Humor, masquerade, song — these things help us face death and even celebrate it (with fingers crossed). All Hallows’ Eve, and tomorrow’s All Saints’ Day, are times when we can throw off the stifling solemnity of grief, but opt for something a little darker and truer than sentimental consolation.

In memory of our friend, Roc Ahrensdorf, who died of cancer this summer at age 57, I’d like to share these reflections from Kahlil Gibran.

You would know the secret of death.
But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?
The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.
If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.
For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.

In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;
And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.
Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.
Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling, that he shall wear the mark of the king?
Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

Roc working on our house, April 2008

Friday Non-Random Song: “He Included Me”


This lesser-known hymn from 1909 deserves to be rediscovered by progressive churches. Words by Johnson Oatman Jr., music by Hampton H. Sewell. Sing along at NetHymnal.

I am so happy in Christ today,
That I go singing along my way;
Yes, I’m so happy to know and say,
“Jesus included me, too.”

Refrain

Jesus included me, yes, He included me,
When the Lord said, “Whosoever,” He included me;
Jesus included me, yes, He included me,
When the Lord said, “Whosoever,” He included me.

Gladly I read, “Whosoever may
Come to the fountain of life today”;
But when I read it I always say,
“Jesus included me, too.”

Refrain

Ever God’s Spirit is saying, “Come!”
Hear the Bride saying, “No longer roam”;
But I am sure while they’re calling home,
Jesus included me, too.

Refrain

“Freely come drink,” words the soul to thrill!
O with what joy they my heart do fill!
For when He said, “Whosoever will,”
Jesus included me, too.

Refrain

Eating Your (Anti-Gay) Words, Paladino-Style

Last Sunday, Carl Paladino, the Republican candidate for governor of NY, made a speech to a group of Orthodox rabbis in which he said children shouldn’t be “brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option”. He also bragged about not marching in the Pride Parade. Well, gay groups rightly objected to this, and Paladino apologized. Today’s paper reports that because of this, the head rabbi has withdrawn his endorsement. And I quote:


Rabbi Levin said that he considered the apology a betrayal, and that he pined for the “old Carl” who spoke from his heart rather than bending to political whims.

Rabbi Levin said he was especially upset that Mr. Paladino gave him no notice that he planned to back away from the comments.

“I was in the middle of eating a kosher pastrami sandwich,” Rabbi Levin said. “While I was eating it, they come running and they say, ‘Paladino became gay!’ I said, ‘What?’ And then they showed me the statement. I almost choked on the kosher salami.”


(I’m worried that this is too good to be true. Especially since a Brooklyn rabbi should know the difference between pastrami and salami. Freudian slip, anyone?)

Philosopher Mary Midgley on Darwin Versus the Darwinists


Theos, a UK-based think tank studying religion and culture, conducted an extended interview with British philosopher Mary Midgley last year to commemorate the Darwin bicentennial. (2009 was the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species.) Midgley and interviewer Nick Spencer discussed science as a historical enterprise, the political uses and misuses of evolutionary theory, and the “intelligent design” debate. (Hat tip to the Books and Culture newsletter for the link.) A brief excerpt:

Spencer: It’s fascinating isn’t it how, given the number of crises of faith his work catalysed, Darwin himself didn’t have one. The decline of his Christianity was gentle and gradual and it was no real loss. He certainly lived a life remarkably similar to that of the comfortable, liberal, rural Anglican clergyman he would have been had he gone ahead with his ordination.

Midgley: Yes, he did. I think that it was probably not much of a shock to lose his faith because of the kind of faith that he had, and he had not lost faith in the society, therefore, not in the ideals of the society. The thing he was not committed to doing was comforting the dying by telling them that they were going toheaven, wasn’t it?

My father became a pacifist because he was a Chaplain in the First World War for a short time, and he had to tell men in the trenches what they were dying for, and this was a poignant experience. I’m sure that will have been a thought that occurred to Darwin, and he was unwilling to do it. He had a lot of the clerical life, but he didn’t have that bit.

He says somewhere, doesn’t he, that eternal punishment is an abominable doctrine, sothere were enough really off-putting features in Christianity at the time for him not to betoo bothered if he had to put a great deal of it aside.

Spencer: His was a very propositional faith and when some of those propositions got challenged the whole thing collapsed. He was the first person to admit there was no particular emotional commitment; he distrusted the evidential worth of experience, and as [his wife] pointed out to him, your experience and your feelings are a very important element of religious life.

Midgley: Well, of course, it’s not only important in religious life. He wrote in his autobiography that he had lost a lot of the emotional side of life generally, and what he recorded and recognised clearly was already happening then – he lost his appreciation for music, poetry, landscapes, even scenery. He was becoming more and more obsessed by the need for formal proof, and the work of putting together the details of his argument obviously was important. But of course experience is also part of the evidence, of the data. You’ve got to accept what people tell you, and what they tell you is what they’ve experienced.

People talk about ‘scientific empiricism’, but it isn’t very empirical, it seems to me, because it’s so selective among the experiences that people have. It’s not interested in what you might call strong and positive experiences. The sense that all sorts of things are happening which we don’t understand is a very important element of experience, and anyone who doesn’t take that seriously is not going to get far.

Different approaches have to work together, you see. I’ve used repeatedly the analogy of the senses – we touch things and we also see them and smell them. Now, there’s no continuity between those things, but we use the relation between them to build the full picture. We know that there are optical illusions and also tactile illusions, and we use the one thing to correct the other.

John Ziman used a similar analogy with maps – a political map and a geological map describe the same phenomena but they are doing it in different ways, according to different questions. He highlighted how much we think in terms of diagrams and visua lthings as well. But there’s always a temptation to become wedded to one particular map, and I think the economic map is the one that is currently being taken to represent reality– the bottom line. When you find what the profit and loss is, that’s the reality. And it’s of course the one that’s really under attack at the moment.

Spencer: In Science and Poetry you point out that detailed thinking emerges from imaginative roots, and all science includes philosophic assumptions. I think that’s quite an unfamiliar thought to many people today. Do you want to unpack it a little bit, particularly in relation to Darwinism?

Midgley: Yes, we all have myths through which we explain the world. The word ‘myth’ is a bit awkward because it is sometimes used simply to mean ‘false’, but I find its other meaning very useful. I also talk about dreams and dramas and visions and so forth. Whichever way one talks about it, it’s about an imaginative background, a way of seeing a problem in the world which determines what questions you ask, how you select your questions. The idea that simply, honestly finding the answer to questions is all you need doesn’t work – you’ve got to have the right questions. I think that as the history of science has built up and emerged it’s become clear that this has been a very important factor at every stage.


Why Is It Hard to Feel God’s Love?


(Atheist readers, before you say, “Because He’s not there,” think of a time when you had trouble accepting that another person loved you, and read on.)

Image is a beautiful journal of literature and art that engages with spiritual themes. In a recent post on the Image blog, Kelly Foster explores why it’s so hard to live with an awareness of God’s love:

I do believe in God.

I don’t believe, with any regularity, that God loves me. Or that, whether or not I believe in God, life will necessarily be anything other than the bleak, terror-blanched affair it sometimes appears at three in the morning.

By saying I don’t believe God loves me, I don’t mean that I consciously choose not to believe this—as in I don’t believe the moon landing was a hoax or I don’t believe that drunk driving is a good idea. I am also not saying that I believe that I am so terribly unlovable, that though God loves everyone else, he has somehow singled me out to be damned to a life bereft of comfort. I mean, I’m insecure enough, I’ll grant you, but I’m not that bad.

Instead, I am saying something that is harder to say—which is that if in my bones, I truly believed in a riskier way that the bedrock of my existence was unconditional love, was in fact Love Loving (a term used by David L. Fleming to describe the Divine Vision of St. Ignatius), then I would be different than I am. I would be more generous, more open, more accepting, more free, more at peace—not only with others, but with myself.


Is it bad theology? Bad parents? A hard life? In rejecting these simplistic solutions, Foster ends up counting her blessings, and concludes that the vulnerability of love is just plain hard to bear. It’s a slow, painstaking process of “trying to learn how to open myself just a fraction to a kind of love—a
love that transcends circumstance or condition—that I know has the power
to demolish me.”

To me, that sounds almost like…death. The kind of death Jesus was talking about when he said that we have to lose our lives in order to find them. Love and death are symbolically linked in so many myths and artistic classics because when we trust love, we’re surrendering the defenses that we thought we needed to keep ourselves alive. It’s like walking on water. I believe in Christ’s resurrection chiefly because I need a guarantee from God that love ultimately wins.

Read the whole thing here.

Evangelicals, “Twilight”, and the Suppression of Female Desire


A teenage friend who shares my interest in shirtless hunks introduced me to the Twilight phenomenon, the insanely popular saga for young adults about a love triangle between a vampire, a werewolf, and a young woman with low self-esteem. I confess that I did enjoy the books and movies, mostly for the eye candy but also because the plotting is pretty good. I consider it a guilty pleasure, though, since the relationships and characterization are decidedly anti-feminist. Bella feels completely unworthy of her two superhuman squeezes, and has no interests in life except her romantic obsession. The guys’ treatment of her is also controlling and patriarchal.

The Other Journal , an online journal of theology and culture published by Mars Hill Graduate School, has posted an incisive series of articles by Kj Swanson about evangelicals’ embrace of Twilight. In contrast to Harry Potter, which Christian conservatives denounced for its supernatural themes, Twilight gets approval from evangelical commentators for its promotion of abstinence until marriage.

However, Swanson argues that the common ground between Twilight and evangelical culture is the more disturbing message that good women have no sexual desire, and that it is our responsibility to tame men’s uncontrollable lust by suppressing our own. The series also reflects complementarian gender stereotypes that often pop up in evangelical self-help books about relationships. Men are “naturally” protectors and women are “naturally” victims in need of rescue by a white knight (or sparkly white vampire). Swanson notes how this can lead to an abusive or self-destructive dynamic:

With Edward’s hypervigilance comes Bella’s understanding that aggressive control is an act of care and that protection is conveyed through anger. Consequently, when love is given primarily through protection, being in danger becomes a necessary scenario for receiving love.


For instance, in one distressing scene from New Moon, when Edward has temporarily broken up with Bella, she seeks out a group of men who had previously tried to assault her, so that Edward will telepathically sense her danger and reappear.

This impulse toward self-annihilation recurs at several other points in the book, driven by Bella’s sense that she has nothing else worthwhile to offer her loved ones except the sacrifice of her life. Noting similar themes in evangelical advice guides for young women, Swanson argues that Christian readers of Twilight are too quick to analogize Bella’s sacrifice to Christ’s, when hers comes from a place of shame rather than love. Swanson contrasts this to feminist theologian Phyllis Trible’s view that “the ‘self-effacing woman’ [in Bible stories] is not held up as a Christlike
model to emulate, but as a symbol of what Christ’s death called to an
end.”

Meanwhile, my teenage friend most definitely wears the pants in her relationship with her sweet quiet boyfriend, and has never been shy about declaring that she’d like to “bang” Orlando Bloom. Literature is received in complex ways.