Category Archives: Notable Quotes

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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is a Covenantal Relationship?


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

What is a Covenantal Relationship?

by Alvin T. Ethington

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Autobiographical Fiction: Emotions, Not Facts


A primary reason why I write is to understand myself, my life and my environment. Facts get in the way. I already know those, superficially at least. Creative writing inspired by my experience, but not literally descriptive or duplicative of it, helps me find the principles that underlie these events. I guess I’m still an Ayn Rand disciple in that sense, believing that the wise person should always try to deduce universals from particulars in order to find a rubric for maximizing good outcomes and avoiding repetition of the bad ones.

I prefer poetry and fiction for this purpose and avoid the personal essay form. But fiction can also slide into thinly disguised autobiography, with the same danger that the author will be distracted by the task of replicating key events, rather than exploring the emotions and insights that those events triggered.

Prizewinning author Eric Wasserman explores this dilemma in his article “Embracing Emotional Autobiography Over Factual Representation in Fiction”, published last year in Writers Ask, a writing advice newsletter from the literary journal Glimmer Train. He writes:

One of the most important lessons a beginning writer
can learn is that emotional autobiography should always
take precedence over factual representation. This took me
years of trial and error to grasp when I was first hungry
to become a writer. It’s difficult to convey to a young
writer that events that are deeply personal are usually not
going to be engaging to readers. For instance, all of the
salacious details of your own sexual history may be riveting
to you, but I guarantee they will not be to 95% of the
reading world. However, if one has something fresh to say
about the universal nature of sex, that’s a different story,
and where emotional autobiography becomes crucial.


Wasserman goes on to suggest some writing exercises that can help you differentiate

Speaking Out Against Gay Suicides


The news this fall has been full of tragic stories about young people who were bullied and driven to suicide because they were, or were perceived to be, gay. Many of you have probably heard of sex columnist Dan Savage’s It Gets Better project, in which GLBT adults and allies offer video messages of hope to gay teens. Both celebrities and regular people have contributed hundreds of powerful testimonies in just a few weeks.

I was shocked and moved to learn that “Project Runway” star Tim Gunn had contemplated suicide as a teenager. Tim is the epitome of confident, classic style. On a show where judges often aggrandize themselves by mocking the contestants, he always seems genuinely caring toward the young fashion designers, knowing just how to blend support and critique. Now we know where some of that compassion comes from.

Meanwhile, at Religion Dispatches, progressive Christian theologian Eric Reitan contends that anti-gay religious teachings contributed to the despair and isolation of these young victims. Reitan, a straight ally, says these believers are missing the Bible’s most important message, the law of love:

…Jesus said that we should distinguish true and false teachings by their fruits. And the teaching that homosexuality is a sin—that, in the words of the Southern Baptist Convention, even the desire for homosexual sex is “always sinful, impure, degrading, shameful, unnatural, indecent, and perverted”—this is a teaching that time and again has born poisonous fruits. The shattered promise of Zach Harrington’s life is just one more example in a painful litany.

In the face of that litany defenders of the traditional Christian view dismiss reformers as sell-outs to secular culture. They thump the Bible and quote Leviticus 18:22 or Romans 1:24-27 as if that settled the matter. Of course, that would settle the matter if one blindly accepted the idea that every passage in the Bible, in its most straightforward reading, represents the inerrant word of a perfectly loving God.

But if we accept this idea, either we’ll need to ignore the lessons drawn from sensitive and empathetic attention to our gay and lesbian neighbors, or we’ll need to refrain from practicing such attention at all. After all, when we do attend to gays and lesbians (as love for them calls us to do), it becomes hard to escape the judgment that the supposedly biblical condemnation of homosexuality has been carving a path of destruction through their lives for generations.

And so, if you accept the conservative view about the Bible’s content and its relation to God, either you’ll need to stifle the lessons of compassion and empathy, or you’ll need to refuse to listen with compassion and empathy in the first place.

But can you really have the right theory about a book if the book teaches you to love your neighbors as yourselves, but your theory about it demands that you stifle the character traits most intimately associated with love? If your theory about the Bible leads you to ignore or refuse to hear the suffering cries of your gay and lesbian neighbors, wouldn’t that be a reason to rethink your theory? Put more forcefully, how many gays and lesbians, crushed by the weight of anti-gay teachings, have to kill themselves before we decide that, just maybe, our theory about the Bible isn’t the best fit with the idea that God is love—and hence isn’t the best fit with the content of the Bible itself?

Any theory of the Bible that requires me to ignore my neighbors in favor of teasing out the correct meaning of Romans 1:24-27 seems to do an injustice to the Bible’s heart. If there’s a core message to the Christian Scriptures, it’s that Jesus—a person, not a book—is the fundamental revelation of God. It’s Jesus that John’s Gospel calls the “Word of God,” not the Bible. And in the Gospels, not only does Jesus say nothing about homosexuality, but He is recorded as saying that He comes to us in the form of the neighbor in need—“even the least of these” (Matthew 25:37-40).
…


Lastly, the Massachusetts chapter of the GLBT activist group Join the Impact hosted a candlelight vigil for the suicide victims earlier this month. Audio recordings from the rally at the State House are now available on their website.

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.

Glimmer Train Bulletin: Writing Advice from Benjamin Percy and Others


As always, this month’s bulletin from the literary journal Glimmer Train features some good insights into the writing process and its psychological blocks.

Paola Corso talks about how her fear of revealing family secrets delayed her from sending out her novel-in-stories, Catina’s Haircut (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), which follows four generations of an Italian peasant family from their Calabrian hilltown to Pittsburgh. Her conclusion: “I’ve come to realize that rather than hide it, I should confront it, complicate the simplicity, offer a distinct perspective and details that make it my own, a story that only I can and must tell before it’s told for me….[Rejection] shouldn’t be accepted as a way to silence writers and, more importantly, to silence ourselves. Good stories need to be told and told well. Write them or be written.”

Benjamin Percy advises writers: give everything you’ve got to the piece you’re working on right now. Don’t hold back the good material for later. You’ll always find more:

…Tony Early (the author of Jim the Boy) cured me of that. Years ago, I was talking to him about his story, one of my favorite stories, “The Prophet from Jupiter.” He said that he put everything he had into it. “I was tired of holding back,” he said. His stories up to that point, he felt, had been good. But he wanted to write something truly great, an earth-shaker. So he put every last drop of himself, all of his best material, into a single story.

And it worked. “Prophet” appeared in Harper’s, scored a National Magazine Award, and to this day is widely taught and anthologized.

There was a price. After he finished the story, he lay on the couch feeling emptied, carved-out, certain he would never write anything again. This lasted for two weeks. And then the well filled back up.
…

Read these and other essays in Bulletin 45.

A Stockholm Syndrome in Women’s Poetics?


Gently Read Literature is a monthly web journal of essays on contemporary poetry and literary fiction. In “The Myth of Women’s Masochism”, her essay in the September issue, Stephanie Cleveland takes aim at the eroticizing of violence by successful female poets. Her argument echoes the radical feminist critique of so-called Third Wave feminism, namely that young women today have bought into the rebranding of sexual exploitation as avant-garde and liberating, because it seems too hard to fight the patriarchy. See, for example, Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (Free Press, 2005).

Cleveland’s article begins thus (boldface emphasis mine):

A few years ago, I read an essay in Boston Review on sex education in the U.S. public school system. In that essay, poet and Harvard lecturer Maureen N. McLane praised self-proclaimed “sex-radical” Pat (now Patrick) Califa as a sexual revolutionary. McLane identified Califa’s “infernal trinity—family, conventional sexuality, and gender,” as the fundamental institutions “sexual conservatives wish to defend” (30). She then assured her readers that, although, “From one angle, Califa’s work [] feature[s] defenses of man-boy love, [her] sex-positive embrace of critical sexual thinking, wherever it might lead, remains, if not a model an incitement” (30). My question at the time of reading McLane’s essay remains my question for those who identify as sex radical while simultaneously claiming an allegiance to feminism to date—namely, what exactly is a defense of “man boy love” an incitement to? Put another way, if feminism involves a commitment to social justice, equality, and respect of persons, and if it also involves a commitment to the emancipation of women and children grounded in a rejection of sexual abuse and patriarchal sex (Bar On 76), how then could any incitement toward acceptance of child rape be consistent with a feminist approach to sex?

Far from radical, I would argue that the practice of sexualizing the bodies of children for adult men is actually fairly conventional, as old as patriarchy. Feminism, conversely, affirms the radical (and comparatively new) idea that all practices which violate the rights of women and girls to determine what can be done to our bodies are morally and ethically unacceptable (Bar On 76).

I bring up McLane’s essay here because I think it highlights the ways in which, in recent decades, feminism has been co-opted by a school of neoliberal individualism which aims at preserving—or at least making peace with—the sexual status quo. When pondered thoughtfully however, the fact of child sex abuse throws a pretty big wrench into the liberal argument that the right to individual expression in one’s sexual conduct needs to be upheld at all costs, as does the fact of rape. Our sexual relationships take place within a given social context, one under which all people do not have the same access to power. In order to deny a rapist the ability to “express” his sexuality on or in her body, a woman needs political, social, and economic equality with men; we currently have none of these. This means that a refusal to make judgments about sexual choices and sexual ethics, whether consciously intended or no, is a tacit endorsement of male-supremacy and a boon to those with the most power in contemporary culture—that is, white men.

Perhaps more importantly, abdicating the right to make ethical judgments about sex translates to an abandonment of the vulnerable and comparatively weaker; it is an extremely effective way of silencing victims of child rape. Critical sexual thinking on the other hand involves maintaining an awareness of the material context within which our relationships take place. It means choosing which versions of sex fit with the world we would like to create as feminists. This cannot be reduced down to simply following wherever sexual thoughts might lead—particularly not if they lead to acts of violation on or in another person’s body. That sort of following has more to do with cruelty, privileged laziness and irresponsibility than it does with revolution.

Sadly, I write at a time when postmodern ethical relativism has all but silenced critical thinking about sex in the academy. Many women working within the university system seem reluctant to challenge male-supremist ideology on sex directly; at a time when the predominant philosophical mode holds that nothing really means anything apart from the way we choose to interpret it, overt questioning of social inequity and misogyny do not win a female author any popularity points. But, if as Erik Anderson optimistically writes, “postmodernism as a loose set of aesthetic principles (or loosely principled aesthetic, or principally loose aesthetic) [may have already] ended or is ending” (1), I would argue that women’s poetry ought to be used as a weapon to help hasten that decline.

Instead of defiance however, in my reading of contemporary women’s poems I frequently find male dominance eroticized, masculinity deified, and the sexual subordination of women and children embraced or symbolically “played with,” but seldom challenged. The conventional notion of women’s supposedly innate sexual submissiveness seems to have saturated much contemporary poetic work as well, especially among women. We write as though we are afraid of creating anything that might dampen the erection of a male colleague. Men after all—even the sensitive, literary ones—have frequently laughed at our gentler, more egalitarian versions of sex; they’ve explained to us repeatedly that making love is dishonest, while fucking is truth. And we believe this, groomed to doubt ourselves, determined to prove we can succeed in the male dominated upper echelons of the poetry community….


Read the whole article here.

Tara Bray: “Once”


Despite an email backlog in the triple digits, I kept returning to reread this poem this week because of its delicious language, and its dissection of the human-made distinction between sublime and “ordinary” time. Reprinted by permission of American Life in Poetry, a project of the Poetry Foundation.

American Life in Poetry: Column 285

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

In our busy times, the briefest pause to express a little interest in the natural world is praiseworthy. Most of us spend our time thinking about other people, and scarcely any time thinking about other creatures. I recently co-edited an anthology of poems about birds, and we looked through lots of books and magazines, but here is a fine poem we missed, by Tara Bray, who lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Once

I climbed the roll of hay to watch the heron
in the pond. He waded a few steps out,
then back, thrusting his beak under water,
pulling it up empty, but only once.
Later I walked the roads for miles, certain
he’d be there when I returned. How is it for him,
day after day, his brittle legs rising
from warm green scum, his graceful neck curled,
damp in the bright heat? It’s a dull world.
Every day, the same roads, the sky,
the dust, the barn caving into itself,
the tin roof twisted and scattered in the yard.
Again, the bank covered with oxeye daisy
that turns to spiderwort, to chicory,
and at last to goldenrod. Each year, the birds—
thick in the air and darting in wild numbers—
grow quiet, the grasses thin, the light leaves
earlier each day. The heron stood
stone-still on my spot when I returned.
And then, his wings burst open, lifting the steel-
blue rhythm of his body into flight.
I touched the warm hay. Hoping for a trace
of his wild smell, I cupped my hands over
my face: nothing but the heat of fields
and skin. It wasn’t long before the world
began to breathe the beat of ordinary hours,
stretching out again beneath the sky.

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 ©2006 by Tara Bray, and reprinted from her most recent book of poems, Mistaken for Song, Persea Books, Inc., 2009, by permission of the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2010 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.