Category Archives: Notable Quotes

John Ollom’s Dance Troupe Merges Sex and Spirit


It’s June…the month of weddings for those who are legally allowed to do so…and also the month when Reiter’s Block becomes just a little bit gayer.

Our first Pride Month post features dancer-choreographer John Ollom, director of Prismatic Productions and Ollom Movement Art. Their new production, “M.U.D. (Men Under Dirt)”, fuses dance, music, and video to enact a man’s journey to spiritual wholeness. Through passionate struggle, the lead character discovers how to integrate the male and female elements within himself and embrace his sexuality. The work owes much to Jungian ideas of male and female archetypes and the shadow self.

We enjoyed a performance of “M.U.D.” at the Soulforce Anti-Heterosexism Conference last fall. (We got the R-rated version, undies on.) The gay entertainment blog Jed Central has posted a good review of the production that just closed in New York, plus an exclusive interview with John. I found these remarks especially insightful:

Jed Ryan: You have mentioned that gay male love, as opposed to gay male sexuality, is vastly under-explored in theater, cinema, etc. Why is that?

John Ollom: You asked me about love between men as a concept that is not portrayed in current film, dance or theatre. Our current society is so afraid to see love between men. It is getting comfortable seeing men fuck and fight and be objects of sexual desire, but to see men desiring each other’s touch and love is truly radical. That is why this work is so important. Look at “Brokeback Mountain” for example. I know homosexual men who hated that movie. There is so much internalized homophobia and self hatred, that only one scene shows them fucking. You do not see any love or tenderness or joy in their life. You only see pain and suffering. This is 2010. Have we not progressed since the films and theatre works in the 80’s when so many men tragically lost their lives to AIDS? Can we not see men loving each other and having no shame in this part of their life?

I have had two experiences in my career as a choreographer with an Artistic Director from a company (that will remain unnamed here) and a composer at a university. They were both terrified that I was showing men in love on stage. They begged me to “hide” or abstract my work. I refused. This caused my work to be cut from one venue. This was done by homosexual men. One of these men later wrote me and thanked me for showing me that he was a “homophobic” homosexual. I don’t think that shame and self hatred have to be a part of our collective experience. I think with HONESTY this work can reveal the male condition. This work can comment on how we as men are conditioned in this current society. I have had to look into other cultures that have revered the male-to-male relationship as a rite of passage to honor the phallus, the male comradery, but the male intimacy is still something that can only lie in the “shadows”. That is why “M.U.D.” is truly revolutionary. I think man to man love is truly the “shadow” of the film, theatre and dance industry. Men are insecure about their penis size, their lust for other men, their desire to love or be loved by men, regardless of sexual orientation. Audience feedback has also revealed that they highly appreciated my awareness in not being binary in the sexual expression of my bisexual character. There was an ambiguity and complexity to love and sex that was not oversimplified into “gay” or “straight” manifestations of one dimensional characters. Different types of love, lust and rage were shown on a spectrum of a complex human being.


I think John’s right that male-to-male intimacy and vulnerability are even more taboo, in our culture, than the actual sex. This probably comes from the culturally conditioned misconception that emotion is a weakness rather than a source of authenticity and power. The job of expressing emotion is outsourced to women, who are perceived as having less to lose because we’re not supposed to be dominant anyhow.

As an artist, I struggle to overcome that conditioning. Particularly in my fiction about gay men, I worry “do they sound too much like women?” when they express love instead of just sex. But everyone (not just men, or gay men) will be more free when those taboos are challenged.

Local readers take note: John will be teaching a movement workshop at Smith College in Northampton on August 7-14.

Theologian Patrick Cheng Rethinks Sin and Grace from a GLBT Perspective


Patrick S. Cheng is an ordained minister with the Metropolitan Community Churches and a professor of systematic theology at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, MA. He is also a religion columnist for the Huffington Post. I discovered his writings via the Other Sheep newsletter. In the opinion columns and scholarly articles on his website, Cheng draws the connection between a truly incarnational Christian theology and the healing of our oppressive legalism and dualism surrounding human sexuality.

As Richard Beck recently observed on his Experimental Theology blog, our current liturgical season of Pentecost celebrates an end to “othering” (viewing our fellow human beings as alien and subhuman). Beck writes, “The Kingdom is marked by its assault on Othering. Where Othering has vanished the Kingdom has come.”

Similarly, Cheng contends that the marriage of human and divine natures in Jesus ought to serve as a model for non-dualistic thinking about gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and other categories we use to divide and oppress one another. In his article “Rethinking Sin and Grace for LGBT People Today”, Cheng writes about four christological models and their parallels to the lives of gay and trans people, one of which is the “Hybrid Christ”:

Hybridity is a concept from postcolonial theory that describes the mixture of two things that leads to the creation of a third “hybrid” thing. For example, the experience of being a racial minority or an immigrant within the United States can be
described in terms of hybridity. In the case of Asian Americans, they are neither purely
“Asian” (because they live in the United States) nor are they purely “American” (because
they are of Asian descent). Rather, they are a third “hybrid” or “in-between” thing,
which ultimately challenges the binary and hierarchical nature of the original two
categories of “Asian” (outsider) and “American” (insider).

For me, the Hybrid Christ arises out of the theological understanding that Jesus
Christ is simultaneously divine and human in nature. He is neither purely one nor the
other. In the words of the Athanasian Creed, Jesus Christ is simultaneously both “God
and human,” and yet he is “not two, but one Christ.” As such, he is the ultimate hybrid
being. This hybrid nature is reflected in the double consciousness that is experienced by
many racial minorities in the United States such as Asian Americans, African Americans,
Latino/as, Native Americans, and others.

Marcella Althaus-Reid, the late lesbian theology professor from the United
Kingdom, wrote about the Hybrid Christ in her book Indecent Theology. Specifically,
Althaus-Reid wrote about the “Bi/Christ,” in which the bisexual Jesus challenges the
“heterosexual patterns of thought” of hierarchical and binary categories. Just as the
bisexual person challenges the heterosexual binaries of “male/female” and “straight/gay,”
the “Bi/Christ” challenges the either/or way of thinking with respect to theology (for
example, by deconstructing “poor” and “rich” as mutually exclusive categories in
liberation theology) and therefore can be understood as the Hybrid Christ.

Thus, a theology of the Hybrid Christ recognizes that Jesus Christ exists
simultaneously in both the human and divine worlds. This can be seen most clearly in
the post-resurrection narratives. As a resurrected person with a human body, Jesus Christ
is “in-both” worlds (that is, both human and divine), and yet he is also “in-between” both
worlds (that is, neither purely human nor purely divine). Although this can be a painful
experience — metaphorically speaking, Jesus Christ has no place to lay down his head —
his hybridity is what ultimately allows him to build a bridge between the human and
divine.

If the Hybrid Christ is defined as the One who is simultaneously both human and
divine, then sin — as what opposes the Hybrid Christ — is singularity, or the failure to
recognize the reality of existing in multiple worlds. For example, sin is failing to
recognize the complex reality of multiple identities within a single person, which in turn
silences the experiences of those individuals who exist at the intersections of race,
gender, sexual orientation, age, and other categories. As postcolonial theorists have
pointed out, this kind of singularity (for example, defining the “gay” community solely in
terms of sexual orientation and not taking into account race) results in the creation of a
number of “others” who are never fully part of the larger community and thus feel like
perpetual outsiders (for example, LGBT people of color).
…


Read the whole essay here.

Other notable writings on Cheng’s website include “Kuan Yin: Mirror of the Queer Asian Christ” and the Huffington Post article “‘Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin’ and Other Modern-Day Heresies”. An excerpt from the latter follows:

…I contend that people who advocate “love the sinner, hate the sin” with respect to LGBT people are actually the ones who are the modern-day heretics. In my view, these people are nothing more than contemporary versions of the gnostics who were condemned by the early Church. The gnostics, strongly influenced by Platonic philosophy, believed in a dualism of the spirit and flesh. That is, spirit was good, whereas flesh (indeed, all matter) was evil. For example, the heretical religious thinker Marcion (d. 160 C.E.) believed that the God of the Hebrew Scriptures was in fact evil because that “god” had engaged in the “evil” act of creation! (Even the great theologian Augustine of Hippo was a Manichaean dualist before his conversion to Christianity, and in some ways he never entirely gave up that world view. See, e.g., De Civitate Dei at 14.6.)

Traditional Christian theology, going at least as far back as Irenaeus in the second century C.E., has condemned such dualism because orthodox doctrine understands creation to be good and that God has created humanity in God’s own image and likeness. This is why we profess in the Nicene Creed that we believe in “one God” who is the creator of “all that is seen and unseen,” including the gift of human sexuality in all of its forms. And that is why the central revelation of Christianity involves the incarnation, or the goodness of the Word made flesh. Indeed, of all the possible ways of reconciling Godself to us, God chose to take on the form of human flesh. To paraphrase the Eastern Orthodox concept of divinization, God became human so that humans could become divine.

As such, I believe those Christians who “hate” LGBT sexualities and gender expressions while allegedly “loving” LGBT people are nothing more than modern-day gnostics. It is simply not possible to divorce one’s sexuality or gender expression — LGBT or otherwise — from one’s spiritual self, particularly if such sexualities and gender expressions are rooted in the love of God, the love of the other, and the love of the self.
…


This is why I still care about traditional Christology. It’s a justice issue. The liberal image of Jesus as a merely human role model still leaves in place the most fundamental dualism, the gap between God and man. Then we have nothing left to do but choose sides. Liberals choose compassion for neighbor while conservatives choose obedience to God. Neither rubric is adequate to deal with Othering, “the root cause of sin” (to quote Richard Beck’s post again).

In Jesus, as traditionally understood, God and neighbor are one.

Monday Non-Random Song: Edith Piaf, “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien”


I’m giving up self-pity for Pentecost.

Non, rien de rien,
Non, je ne regrette rien,
Ni le bien qu’on m’a fait,
Ni le mal, tout ça m’est bien égal.

Non, rien de rien,
Non, je ne regrette rien,
C’est payé, balayé, oublié,
Je me fous du passé.

Avec mes souvenirs, j’ai allumé le feu,
Mes chagrins, mes plaisirs, je n’ai plus besoin d’eux,
Balayées les amours, avec leurs trémolos,
Balayées pour toujours, je repars à zéro

Non, rien de rien,
Non, je ne regrette rien,
Ni le bien qu’on m’a fait,
Ni le mal, tout ça m’est bien égal.

Non, rien de rien,
Non, je ne regrette rien,
Car ma vie car mes joies,
Aujourd’hui, ça commence avec toi.


(Lyrics courtesy of www.elyrics.net) />

You Gotta Give ‘Em Hope


Today, May 22, would have been the 80th birthday of civil rights leader Harvey Milk . Milk made history as the first openly gay candidate
elected to public office in California. He served only 11 months on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors before his assassination in 1978. His passion for justice extended beyond his own community, to the struggles of all disenfranchised people, as this clip from his famous “Hope” speech shows:



Get Paid for Being Crazy: Some Quotes on the Writing Life


The prestigious literary journal Crazyhorse recently asked its readers to submit their favorite quotes about writing. The editors’ choices from this batch were included in their latest email newsletter. Below are some of my favorites:

“If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.”
—Hunter S. Thompson

“I write a little every day, without hope and without despair.”
—Isak Dinesen

“Always pull back—and see how silly we must look to God.”
—Jack Kerouac

“Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.”
—Susan Sontag

“You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.”
—Richard Hugo

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
—Ray Bradbury

“The process of writing will always be trying to repair something that doesn’t exist with tools you have to invent on the spot.”
—George Saunders

“Any writer who knows what he’s doing isn’t doing very much.”
—Nelson Algren

“Confront the dark parts of yourself…. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.”
—August Wilson

“Truth is not an unveiling which destroys the secret, but a revelation that does it justice.”
—Walter Benjamin

“Writing isn’t about applause. It’s about humiliation.”
—Steve Almond

“Before I start writing I feel affectionate, interested, and frustrated. In that order. Afterwards I feel relieved, disgusted, and confused. Sometimes I don’t think it’s worth it.”
—Joy Williams

“A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.”
—James Dickey

“Go forth my book and help to destroy the world as it is.”
— Russell Banks

“I always write from my own experiences whether I’ve had them or not.”
—Ron Carlson

Campus Extracurricular Groups Claim “Religious Freedom” to Discriminate


From the April 29 issue of Religion Dispatches comes this story by RD associate editor Sarah Posner:

Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, a case closely watched by both the religious right and civil liberties advocates. At issue in the case is whether the Hastings College of Law, part of the University of California system, violated the CLS’s First Amendment rights by requiring that the Society comply with the school’s non-discrimination policy in order to receive official school recognition as a club.

Hastings, a state-funded institution, requires school clubs, in order to receive the benefits of official recognition, to adhere to the policy which prohibits discrimination on the basis of, among other things, religion and sexual orientation. CLS, which requires members and those wishing to hold leadership positions in the club to be professing Christians and to disavow “unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle,” requested an exemption from these provisions in 2004, which Hastings refused. Although Hastings never denied CLS access to and use of school facililities, the decision meant CLS could not make use of benefits offered to official school clubs, including limited funding from student activity fees. CLS sued in October 2004, lost both at the trial and appellate court levels, and then appealed to the Supreme Court.

CLS’s mission, according to its Web site, is “to inspire, encourage, and equip lawyers and law students, both individually and in community, to proclaim, love and serve Jesus Christ through the study and practice of law, the provision of legal assistance to the poor, and the defense of religious freedom and sanctity of human life.” Through its Law School Ministries, it “encourages students in faith, connection with Christian mentors, professional development, exposure to other Christian students, and future employment. As many secular law schools have abandoned traditional education concerning the origins of law, increasing emphasis is placed on the foundations and practices which integrate faith and practice.”

…


Read the rest of the story here . Basically, CLS is arguing that it should have the freedom to uphold certain faith-based moral standards for its members, or else its mission is in jeopardy. Almost by definition, if their values weren’t somewhat different from the values of the secular university, CLS wouldn’t need to exist. Meanwhile the ACLU legal expert makes the point that in past generations, business owners who opposed equal pay for women or equal treatment for black customers also sometimes claimed religious exemptions, and it’s a good thing they didn’t succeed. Both sides have some merit, I think.

This story made me remember the young libertarian college student I used to be, who would have come down firmly on the side of CLS. While I always supported gay rights in theory, the issue occupied a much smaller place in my consciousness. The power imbalance that truly incensed me was the power of the institution over the dissenting individual.

I wasn’t yet a Christian, though inching in that direction; my primary religion was the creative life of the mind. I believed in the university as a temple devoted to the pursuit of truth (hey, I was 18). I was infuriated to find that in practice, we had to finesse our real opinions all the time in order to avoid a bad grade that would hurt our employment chances after college, negating our parents’ incredible financial sacrifices for our education. Where did our moral obligations lie – with the truth or with family loyalty?

So, freedom of conscience was very much on my mind. I was also alert to the paradoxes of “liberal tolerance” so incessantly pointed out by Stanley Fish: in the name of “freedom” and “equality”, the administration might use its unequal power to suppress some student perspectives and constrain their ability to act with integrity.

But when you’re a student, you think the university is the entire world, and it revolves around your issues. At least it was like that for me. Non-affirming conservative Christians may well be an oppressed minority on college campuses, but they are the oppressive majority in the rest of America. This is not to say that two wrongs make a right. It’s just important to remember the wider context. CLS presumably wants its members to use their legal skills to block full civil equality for GLBT people when they graduate. Their gathering is not just about personal self-expression.

Now that I am older, queerer, and more politically aware, what do I think the correct outcome should be? Personally, I wish both sides would stand down. It’s unfortunate that the Supreme Court will end up settling what is really a political balancing act rather than a question of constitutional law.

To CLS, I would say, “Suck it up.” It’s a bit disingenuous to define yourself in opposition to liberal-pluralist values, and then invoke those values to win the freedom to discriminate. The hardship you’re being asked to suffer for your faith is relatively minor. It would be a different story if the students were actively penalized for joining CLS, or for expressing their views in the classroom in a non-hostile way. Here, a completely optional extracurricular activity is merely being denied certain privileges.

You kids might also want to reconsider making homophobia the litmus test for Christian purity. You can’t imagine how many people close their minds to the gospel because Christians have such a hateful reputation.

To Hastings College, I would say, “Face your fears.” Don’t act so afraid of controversial viewpoints. Promote dialogue between the CLS and gay student groups. Facilitate debates about different visions of society and how religion should interact with law and politics. After all, anti-gay Christians are out there in the real world. By suppressing those voices on campus (beyond what’s necessary to prevent harassment), are you really equipping your students to handle them as adults?

Heterosexism 101: Mike Huckabee


Today’s lesson in straight privilege is brought to you by former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a contender for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008 and possibly again in 2012. He is also an ordained Southern Baptist minister. In a recent interview with The Perspective, the student newspaper of the College of New Jersey, he repeated the old slur that legalizing gay marriage is equivalent to approving drug abuse, incest, and polygamy. As quoted in the Associated Press:

Huckabee added that his goal isn’t to tell others how to live, but that the burden of proving that a gay marriage can be successful rests with the activists in favor of changing the law.

“I don’t have to prove that marriage is a man and a woman in a relationship for life,” he said. “They have to prove that two men can have an equally definable relationship called marriage, and somehow that that can mean the same thing.”


Thank you, Mike, for defining inequality in a nutshell. We don’t think often enough about burdens of proof and why they fall where they do. More often, we take sides in existing debates without asking how one group seized the benefits of normalcy and whether they ought to retain it.

Do straights deserve to put gays on the defensive because we’re a majority? I thought one of the cornerstones of our American civil religion was the belief, embodied in the Bill of Rights, that the individual has certain fundamental human rights that shouldn’t be subject to majority vote.

Because we populate the planet? The harsh realities of nomadic desert life could explain why the Abrahamic faiths discouraged non-procreative sex, but environmentalists might say we need the reverse incentive now.

Because we’ve done such a good job keeping our marital vows? Three words: 50% divorce rate.

I think many traditionalists refuse to listen to gay-rights arguments because it’s scary to consider that our favorite “natural” hierarchies might be arbitrary and self-serving. Without even realizing it, we’re all somewhat invested in upholding social categories that make us feel better about ourselves.

The Bible has a word for basing our self-esteem on something other than God’s unmerited love for us. It’s called idolatry.

Of Empty Tombs


They crucified my Savior upon a common cross.
They crucified my Savior upon a common cross.
They crucified my Savior upon a common cross,
And God’s grace will lead my spirit home.

    –“Christ Rose“, 18th-century African-American spiritual

The following story comes from the April 11, 2010 Associated Press newswire (not reprinted here in full for copyright reasons):

THIES, Senegal – Even death cannot stop the violence against gays in this corner of the world any more.

Madieye Diallo’s body had only been in the ground for a few hours when the mob descended on the weedy cemetery with shovels. They yanked out the corpse, spit on its torso, dragged it away and dumped it in front of the home of his elderly parents.

The scene of May 2, 2009 was filmed on a cell phone and the video sold at the market. It passed from phone to phone, sowing panic among gay men who say they now feel like hunted animals.

“I locked myself inside my room and didn’t come out for days,” says a 31-year-old gay friend of Diallo’s who is ill with HIV. “I’m afraid of what will happen to me after I die. Will my parents be able to bury me?”

A wave of intense homophobia is washing across Africa, where homosexuality is already illegal in at least 37 countries.

In the last year alone, gay men have been arrested in Kenya, Malawi, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. In Uganda, lawmakers are considering a bill that would sentence homosexuals to life in prison and include capital punishment for ‘repeat offenders.’ And in South Africa, the only country that recognizes gay rights, gangs have carried out so-called “corrective” rapes on lesbians.

“Across many parts of Africa, we’ve seen a rise in homophobic violence,” says London-based gay-rights activist Peter Tatchell, whose organization tracks abuse against gays and lesbians in Africa. “It’s been steadily building for the last 10 years but has got markedly worse in the last year.”

To the long list of abuse meted out to suspected homosexuals in Africa, Senegal has added a new form of degradation — the desecration of their bodies.

In the past two years, at least four men suspected of being gay have been exhumed by angry mobs in cemeteries in Senegal. The violence is especially shocking because Senegal, unlike other countries in the region, is considered a model of tolerance….


The article goes on to say that the current backlash in Senegal began in 2008 when a tabloid published pictures of a clandestine gay wedding. Suspected gays were arrested and tortured. Worsening economic conditions also fueled the search for a scapegoat, Cheikh Ibrahima Niang, a professor of social anthropology at Senegal’s largest university, told the AP reporter.

…The crackdown also coincided with spiraling food prices. Niang says political and religious leaders saw an easy way to reach constituents through the inflammatory topic of homosexuality.
“They found a way to explain the difficulties people are facing as a deviation from religious life,” says Niang. “So if people are poor — it’s because there are prostitutes in the street. If they don’t have enough to eat, it’s because there are homosexuals.”


Muslim imams preached in favor of killing gays. The same sentiments were published in Senegalese newspapers and magazines. Some people evidently took the exhortations to heart:

…Around this time, in May 2008, a middle-aged man called Serigne Mbaye fell ill and died in a suburb of Dakar.

His children tried to bury him in his village but were turned back from the cemetery because of widespread rumors that he was gay. His sons drove his body around trying to find a cemetery that would accept him. They were finally forced to bury him on the side of a road, using their own hands to dig a hole, according to media reports.

The grave was too shallow and the wind blew away the dirt. When the decomposing body was later discovered, Mbaye’s children were arrested and charged with improperly burying their father.

In the town of Kaolack three months later, residents exhumed the grave of another man believed to be gay. In November 2008, residents in Pikine removed a corpse from a mosque of another suspected homosexual and left it on the side of the road….

…Among the people who appeared in the photograph published from the gay wedding was a young man in his 30s from Thies. He was an activist and a leader of a gay organization called And Ligay, meaning “Working together,” which he ran out of his parents’ house.

He was HIV-positive and on medication.

When the tabloid published the photograph, Diallo went into hiding, according to a close friend who asked not to be named because he too is gay. Unable to go to the doctor, Diallo stopped taking his anti-retrovirals. By the spring of 2009, he was so ill that his family checked him into St. Jean de Dieu, a Catholic hospital in downtown Thies, says the friend.

He was in a coma when he died at 5:50 a.m. on May 2, 2009, according to the hospital’s records. Although the hospital has a unit dedicated to treating HIV patients, the young man’s family never disclosed his illness, according to the doctor in charge.

Several gay friends tried to see Diallo in the hospital but were told to stay away by his family, says the friend.

When the AP tried to speak to Diallo’s elderly father at his shop on the main thoroughfare in Thies, his other children demanded the reporter leave. One sister covered her face and sobbed. Another said, “There are no homosexuals here.”

Hours after he died, his family took Diallo’s body to a nearby mosque, where custom holds the corpse should be bathed and wrapped in a white cloth. Before the family could bathe him, news reached the mosque that Diallo was gay and they were chased out, says the dead man’s friend. His relatives hastily wrapped him in a sheet and headed to the cemetery, where they carried him past the home of Babacar Sene.

“A man that’s known as being a homosexual can’t be buried in a cemetery. His body needs to be thrown away like trash,” says Sene. “His parents knew that he was gay and they did nothing about it. So when he died we wanted to make sure he was punished.”


Where in this story is the Savior who was crucified? On which side do you think you’ll find him?

In Memoriam: The Internet Monk


Dennis Michael Spencer, the Christian blogger known as the Internet Monk, passed away on April 5 at age 53 after a four-month battle with cancer. He left behind him a devoted community of readers who were inspired and challenged by his “dispatches from the post-evangelical wilderness”.

Michael never shrank from pointing out uncomfortable truths about American Christianity’s militarism, materialism, shallowness, and other distractions from a faith centered on God’s grace and Christ’s saving work. He gave a voice to many people who felt that their church was no longer a safe place to admit that they weren’t perfect. While I had trouble with his conservatism on sexuality and gender, and wish he could have extended his wonderful critique of legalism to include these issues, the work he did is enduring and valuable, and (in my opinion) led by the Holy Spirit.

I’m happy to see that his literary agent, Jeff Dunn, and the guest preachers who filled in on his blog when he became ill, plan to continue the iMonk website and community. Among other projects, they will be promoting his book Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality, forthcoming from WaterBrook Press in September. Pre-order your copy at Amazon.com now.

One of the most popular and representative of Michael’s blog posts was “Wretched Urgency“, in which he confronts Christians’ “guilt-inducing, blood on your hands” panic about making converts. We should be zealous to know Christ and be transformed into his image, Michael says, but a “humble and quiet rest in who God is and what God does” should always come first. God’s grace saves the world, not us.

My personal favorite from the iMonk archives, though, is the 2006 post “I Hear Pepper Talking“. I thought I was the only one who felt compassion for inanimate objects. Without sliding into pantheism, Michael defends his tendency to personification, saying it’s not only a sign of respect for God’s creation, but an ethically useful habit of mind that counteracts our tendency to dehumanize people:

…The smallest thing I ever personified was a packet of pepper. I got it in the cafeteria line and didn’t use it, so I put it in my pocket. When I got ready to throw it away, it said “Please, sir. I was created to be useful to someone’s food. Can’t you give me another chance? Don’t throw me away and waste my life.”…

…If someone were to film our family personifying animals, they would conclude we were several fries short of a happy meal. We enjoy the fun. We’ve passed on this little habit to our kids, and along the way, taught them to think about what they were doing to a toy, or how it felt to be lost and misplaced, or why something given as a gift wants to be shared.

God took the dust of the earth and made human beings. He took a rib and made Eve. These are stories of God making persons out of the impersonal. Capon (via Augustine) says that we are given our meaning in the mind of God, who conceived of us as persons when we were not yet, and had done nothing. He thought of us, as we are at every stage and moment of life, loved us in Jesus, and reconciled himself to us… all before we existed. He delights in us in his own thoughts in perfect grace….and then he makes us persons in his image and in his Son.

We are persons, made in God’s image, only because God gives to us a voice, significance and life. We have life in Christ. His life is the light of men. He gives creation its personal character. We are persons because we reflect our creator, and not just the creation or other beings. We are made persons by God’s personal action to cause us to be, and to be again.

Jesus treated all those he met with love, dignity and compassion. He made persons out of the non-persons in his culture. He included the sinful, the excluded and the dehumanized. Oppressors have always used the process of dehumanization to cement their power over the world, but God causes the downtrodden to be lifted up, the forgotten to be remembered, and the dead to be raised up.

Now we who are loyal to Jesus and worship the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ are person-makers as well. We follow Jesus when we look upon the world and endow it, again, with its God-given character. All that God has created displays dimensions of his being, and the wonderful work of his hands. We do not merely exist, use or consume, but we worship God as stewards and namers of creation. We are creative because we want to take the someTHING and show that it all related to and speaks for someONE.

Most significantly of all, we give voice and significant to other persons in a dehumanizing, empty world. We make persons out of the lonely, the overlooked and the suffering. We refuse to live dumbly and distracted in a world where people are numbers and statistics. We seek to joyfully live and serve in a way that gives human dignity, human respect and God’s love and grace to every person who knows us, works with us or lives with us.

Our personification is ongoing, as God makes us, through the Spirit, more and more like himself. Our giving personal significance to others is ongoing as well. Whether we are parents, teachers, artists, counselors or caregivers, we imitate and obey God when we make those around us more the persons God created of for whom Christ died.


Rest in peace, generous heart.

Shantideva: “The Way of the Bodhisattva”


I came across this poem in the latest monthly newsletter from the Insight Meditation Center of Pioneer Valley, the Buddhist center that my husband attends. Although I believe that evil is real and has consequences in this lifetime and beyond, Christians sometimes get hung up on hellfire, neglecting to ponder how God’s infinite love and compassion are stronger than any sin. That is, after all, what we’re supposed to be celebrating this Easter weekend. The Christian equivalent of this poem may be the Harrowing of Hell, a doctrine that’s been obscured in the modern West but still part of the Eastern Orthodox celebration of Easter.

Moreover, I think it’s good to wish that all living beings will be saved, whether or not we feel secure about asserting universalism as a doctrine. If we could spend more time contemplating visions like Shantideva’s, and less time dwelling on images of divine punishment (eternal or otherwise), we might find it easier to love our neighbors as ourselves.

The Way of the Bodhisattva

Throughout the spheres and reaches of the world,
In hellish states wherever they may be,
May beings fettered there, tormented,
Taste the bliss and peace of Sukhavati.

May those caught in the freezing ice be warmed,
And from the massing clouds of bodhisattvas’ prayers
May torrents rain in boundless streams
To cool those burning in infernal fires.

May forests where the leaves are blades and swords
Become sweet groves and pleasant woodland glades.
And may the trees of miracles appear,
Supplanting those upon the hill of shalmali.

And may the very pits of hell be sweet
With fragrant pools all perfumed with the scent of lotuses,
Be lovely with the cries of swan and goose
And water fowl so pleasing to the ear.

May fiery coals turn into heaps of jewels,
The burning ground become a crystal floor,
The crushing hills celestial abodes,
Adorned with offerings, the dwelling place of buddhas.

May the hail of lava, fiery stones, and weapons
Henceforth become a rain of blossom.
May those whose hell it is to fight and wound
Be turned to lovers offering their flowers.

And those engulfed in fiery Vaitarani,
Their flesh destroyed, their bones bleached white as kunda flowers,
May they, through all my merit’s strength, have godlike forms,
And sport with goddesses in Mandakini’s peaceful streams.

(Excerpt from Shantideva’s Dedication in No Time to Lose: A Timely Guide to the Way of the Bodhisattva by Pema Chodron, pp.343-45.)