tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14159670068030937432024-03-13T14:12:35.189-07:00(Non)Secular Girlweekly sermonsUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger45125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-80069673676552786802013-06-09T20:12:00.004-07:002013-06-09T20:12:52.228-07:00New WEBSITE!!!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
So, Nonsecular Girl has moved! For the latest post go to: <a href="http://www.nonseculargirl.com/">www.nonseculargirl.com</a>.<br />
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Cheers!<br />
<br />
Casey</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-77372073487255210182013-06-02T19:56:00.000-07:002013-06-02T19:56:56.399-07:00Sermon for Brokenness<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Oscar Wilde famously said, "I drink to separate my body from my soul." He would not be the only one to try such a futile endeavor, to think she might unshackle her soul from the body's cage with magical key-shaped elixirs, to think, erroneously, that the cage and the prisoner are two different things.<br />
<br />
It's one thing to believe in mind-body-spirit connectedness when you possess a healthy, young body. <br />
<br />
But imagine you have a body that really feels like a cage--a body with a horrible or chronic disease like ALS or Cystic Fibrosis, or a body that doesn't suit the norms of beauty, or an infertile body. Then, you'd like nothing more than to cleave your soul from its fickle sinew. Your body feels like a betrayal, a jailhouse instead of a home. It can make you angry.<br />
<br />
For example, if you can't translate the following sentence into standard English without help, then I don't want to talk to you about my body and I don't want your illiterate platitudes:<br />
<br />
<i>The AVG DPO for a BFP is 12.6 and symptoms leading up to a BFP may include increased CM and moodiness, although these symptoms also mimic those of AF, so your DH may have to remain sensitive during the TTW, and you may get a false BFN because your HCG levels haven't reached a high enough level for even a FRER. </i><br />
<br />
But if you're trying to have a baby, like me, you're fluent in the language of neurosis and can play translator without batting an eyelid:<br />
<br />
<i>The average day past ovulation for a Big Fat Positive is 12.6 and symptoms leading up to a Big Fat Positive may include increased cervical mucus and moodiness, although these symptoms also mimic those of Aunt Flow, so your Dear Hubby may have to remain sensitive during the Two Week Wait, and you may get a false Big Fat Negative because your human chorionic gonadotropin levels haven't reached a high enough level for even a First Response Early Response pregnancy test. </i><br />
<br />
And still, you may have the words and not the meaning. You may not know there exists an entire culture of women who speak this language to each other, that use acronyms both as a form of intimacy and a form of shame and silence. You may not know that the preoccupation with a body that's not working the way you want it to work, and its relentless chatter in the form of aches and pains and ghost symptoms, can be one of the most soul-killing experiences a human might endure. <br />
<br />
Sometimes I want to unzip my spirit from its skin, like a dirty dress that I've worn to too many events in the same week. More often, though, I have the opposite and counter-intuitive reaction: I want to keep wearing that dress until the stench and lint and sweat stains mirror what they clothe. <br />
<br />
What's this got to do with God? Well, don't worry--I'm not going to talk about those Old Testament matriarchs who suffered so mightily from infertility they offered their aged husbands Egyptian concubines only to have God grant them a baby in their 90s or something absurd like that. Those myths have their magic, but they irritate you when you want a baby yourself because science shows I don't have until my 90s, God or IVF nonwithstanding. The only thing I like about any of the stories is the moment Sarah laughs at the prophets who foresee Isaac. I like to imagine she scoffs more than giggles. Like, "Yeah, right, Yahweh."<br />
<br />
No, I'm going to talk about poets, specifically Christian Wiman and Mark Doty. The former suffered from bone cancer, the latter the death of his partner from AIDS. The body is familiar if painful territory for both men. <br />
<br />
And then I'll talk about the incarnate word, spirit made flesh in the form of Jesus.<br />
<br />
The title poem to Wiman's most recent book of poetry speaks to the broken body, or, rather, the brokenness of all things earthly. I admire most its form, how well it responds to the poem's content--the repeated line, broken in various ways until its last utterance when it is no longer riven but whole, without the fractures and sprains of commas or dashes:<br />
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #1c1c1c; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Every Riven Thing</strong></div>
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God goes, belonging to every riven thing he’s made<br />sing his being simply by being<br />the thing it is:<br />stone and tree and sky, man who sees and sings and wonders why</div>
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God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he’s made,<br />means a storm of peace.<br />Think of the atoms inside the stone.<br />Think of the man who sits alone<br />trying to will himself into the stillness where</div>
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God goes belonging. To every riven thing he’s made<br />there is given one shade<br />shaped exactly to the thing itself:<br />under the tree a darker tree;<br />under the man the only man to see</div>
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God goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made<br />the things that bring him near,<br />made the mind that makes him go.<br />A part of what man knows,<br />apart from what man knows,</div>
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God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #7a7575; font-family: 'Droid Sans', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 10px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Christian Wiman, from <em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Every Riven Thing</em> (2010).</div>
And I'm thinking of the prologue to Mark Doty's memoir, <i>Heaven's Coast</i>, where he re-positions a childhood memory into the most breathtaking metaphor:<br />
<br />
<i>In the museums we used to visit on family vacations when I was a kid, I used to love those rooms which displayed collections of minerals in a kind of closet or chamber which would, at the push of a button, darken. Then ultraviolet lights would begin to glow and the minerals would seem to come alive, new colors, new possibilities and architectures revealed. Plain stones became fantastic, "futuristic"--a strange word which suggests, accurately, that these colors had something of the world to come about them. Of course there wasn't any black light in the center of the earth, in the caves where they were quarried; how strange that these stones should have to be brought here, bathed with this unnatural light in order for their transcendent characters to emerge. Irradiation revealed a secret aspect of the world.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Imagine illness as that light: demanding, torturous, punitive, it nonetheless reveals more of what things are. A certain glow of being appears. I think this is what is meant when we speculate that death is what makes love possible. Not that things need to be able to die in order for us to love them, but that things need to die in order for us to know what they are. Could we really know anything that wasn't transient, not becoming more itself in the strange, unearthly light of dying? The button pushed, the stones shine, all mystery and beauty, implacable, fierce, austere.</i><br />
<br />
Imagine illness as that light.<br />
<br />
Imagine our bodies, healthy or sick or momentarily struggling, as the light of God.<br />
<br />
Imagine we might need affliction to illuminate our souls. (know, in this imagining, the unfairness of such a reality on some, truly sick people)<br />
<br />
Imagine we could not have a soul without a body.<br />
<br />
Imagine the necessity of Jesus' human body.<br />
<br />
Then the body cannot be a shade of shame or a thing to denounce. Then the body cannot be a cage, and drinking, dear Oscar Wilde, might be more for marrying our bodies to our souls than separating them. Then the body has no use for a language of signs and signals and acronyms. <br />
<br />
The flesh is the word, the word is the flesh.<br />
<br />
Even, and especially, when the flesh is broken.<br />
<br />
<i>Amen.</i><br />
<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-12196103338344471462013-05-26T09:36:00.001-07:002013-05-26T09:42:17.090-07:00Sermon Against the Resounding Gong<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">My first yoga teacher had a serious savior complex. He was gifted at teaching the basic foundations of yoga poses, and is, in large part, why I practice yoga safely and intelligently. But he was so messy—getting overly involved with his students personal lives, making the class about his humor and his experience more than the students’. One time I heard him say to a young—attractive—woman: <i>You should be prepared to start crying in pigeon pose because women carry a lot of sexual trauma in their hips. Don’t hold back if you need to cry.</i> That kind of crap sets my blood boiling—it abuses the power of suggestion and potentially keeps clients from getting real help for real problems. At best, yoga can provide the physical counterpart to other healing processes, but it cannot cure cancer or quell mental illness, nor was it ever designed for such miracles. Of course, that girl in class did start to cry in pigeon pose. What other option did she have, really, if she wanted to stroke her teacher’s ego as he so clearly needed her to?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The yoga studio is fertile ground for such characters, because given the historical connection of yoga to religious practice, people often arrive to class with more than their physical well-being in mind. They want their bodies and their souls healed. Or, they want a bastardized version of yoga that gives them six-packs and defined deltoids, but compromises their bodies. They want the Dalai Lama or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Koresh">David Koresh</a>, and not a simple person trained to offer a student the tools to develop her own strength, heal her own body. Nothing more, nothing less. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Spoiler Alert: I’m not really a preacher. Or a priest.
Or a deacon. Or ordained in
anything at all except, perhaps, my own experience if we think of our births as conferring holy orders on us. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">If you’re reading this blog, you know I’m living in a
precarious space between tongue-in-cheek and sincere, between my instinct to
poke and prod and provoke and my genuine desire to write about my own spiritual
experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m often uncomfortable with
myself here in the Cyberworld: on the one hand, I write from the persona I
create, a persona that protects me; on the other hand, I expose myself
dangerously to strangers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve longed
believed that this straddling between performance and confession lends blogging,
as a form, its tender credibility, its vibrancy in the hands of a decent
writer, and its disproportionate draw for women writers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also, the ephemeral nature of the Internet—a
place where one’s writing both remains and disappears into the void created by
thousands of other users mimics, for me, the slippery way divinity works in my
life.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I’m glad you’re willing to follow me into this shadowy
territory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m also appalled, the same
way I’m appalled when my students turn on their peers because they’ve adopted a
position I posited in class, when they’ve taken something I said while playing
devil’s advocate and digested it as God’s own truth, usually because they want
my approval more than they believe what they’re arguing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If
you’re reading my blog, you’re reading in part because of the personality my
blog implies that I have.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You hear a
voice and imbue the person you imagine behind that voice with an authority and
respect I haven’t exactly earned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">That puts me in disquietingly close proximity to that yoga teacher and those
church leaders who assume a pulpit with very little education or formation, the
ones that scare me silly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">As someone who grew up in the Catholic Church, I feel
suspicious of informality and a lack of credentials.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m a snob that way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t care.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I want my priests and pastors, my professors, and my politicians to be
smarter than me, more educated than me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I do not want George W. Bush’s nicknames, for example, and I don’t want
to call my reverend Billy or Ed or Mitch.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I prefer something more titular….like….I don’t know….Mr. or Mrs.
President, Sister Bernice, or even Reverend King.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These
titles protect us from the person while respecting her expertise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather than create false authority, when used
correctly titles promote healthy personal space and appropriate
boundaries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I do not have my students
call me Casey, for example.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But nor
would I have them call me Dr. Fleming if I haven’t earned a doctorate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I disapprove of any Cult of Personality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I distrust leadership based on charisma and
reputation, leadership that promotes a kind of hero worship that impedes true
learning and undermines mentorship, informalizes and mythologizes the
relationship between student and teacher, and makes the humble sailing vessel
into the majestic sea upon whose depths it can only rest.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The high school classroom is equally fertile ground for such
misguided heroism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Teenagers are
aquiver.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They vibrate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They’re like exposed nerves, susceptible to
even the slightest breeze’s burn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They’re also hormonal and given to high drama, ripe for hero worship and
indoctrination.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s no coincidence most
religions have their youngest members confirmed or Bat Mitzvah-ed during the
teenage years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But in my opinion,
students at that age need to be directed toward the big questions and then
empowered to find their own answers rather than being baptized into certainty. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">On this blog, I’m twisting the form, using the idea of a
sermon to structure my writing for a while.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I have some things to say, and have ordained myself to say them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But do not anoint me with an authority I have
not earned except through voice and style.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>You’ll be disappointed, because you’ll be the spectator of my spiritual
journey instead of the protagonist in your own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">We do not save our followers—in the church, on the page, in
the studio, or in the classroom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They do
that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And when we start to think we can
be our students’ saviors, we’re playing God.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>When we rely on our reputations or personalities rather than our
knowledge and experience to keep our students afloat we’re really sinking their
ships. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’re also taking more love than
we’re giving, since love is always active, not passive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’re acting out of need more than
power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’re keeping them from finding
other, equally important teachers by tethering them to our influence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And we’re acting in direct opposition to St.
Paul’s advice in Corinthians 13:1-3:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><span class="text 1Cor-13-1" id="en-NIV-28667" style="background-color: white;">If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only <b>a resounding gong</b> or a clanging cymbal.</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><span class="text 1Cor-13-2" id="en-NIV-28668" style="background-color: white;"><span class="versenum" style="font-weight: bold; vertical-align: top;">2 </span>If I have the gift of prophecy<span class="crossreference" style="font-weight: bold; vertical-align: top;" value="(<a href="#cen-NIV-28668B" title="See cross-reference B">B</a>)"></span> and can fathom all mysteries<span class="crossreference" style="font-weight: bold; vertical-align: top;" value="(<a href="#cen-NIV-28668C" title="See cross-reference C">C</a>)"></span> and all knowledge,<span class="crossreference" style="font-weight: bold; vertical-align: top;" value="(<a href="#cen-NIV-28668D" title="See cross-reference D">D</a>)"></span>and if I have a faith<span class="crossreference" style="font-weight: bold; vertical-align: top;" value="(<a href="#cen-NIV-28668E" title="See cross-reference E">E</a>)"></span> that can move mountains,<span class="crossreference" style="font-weight: bold; vertical-align: top;" value="(<a href="#cen-NIV-28668F" title="See cross-reference F">F</a>)"></span> but do not have love, I am nothing.</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><span class="text 1Cor-13-3" id="en-NIV-28669" style="background-color: white;"><span class="versenum" style="font-weight: bold; vertical-align: top;">3 </span>If I give all I possess to the poor<span class="crossreference" style="font-weight: bold; vertical-align: top;" value="(<a href="#cen-NIV-28669G" title="See cross-reference G">G</a>)"></span> and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,<span class="footnote" style="font-weight: bold; vertical-align: top;" value="[<a href="#fen-NIV-28669b" title="See footnote b">b</a>]">[<a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+13&version=NIV#fen-NIV-28669b" style="color: #b37162; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: top;" title="See footnote b">b</a>]</span><span class="crossreference" style="font-weight: bold; vertical-align: top;" value="(<a href="#cen-NIV-28669H" title="See cross-reference H">H</a>)"></span> but do not have love, I gain nothing.</span></span></i></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> Last, but certainly not least, many people who end up leading cults of personality didn't start out superficial or twisted, the popularity turned them that way. Hero worship is detrimental for followers, certainly, but it's also a painful spiritual death for the leader. </span></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><o:p>Beware </o:p>and <i>Amen</i>.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-82569575033607481522013-05-19T16:49:00.004-07:002013-05-19T17:07:05.228-07:00Sermon for Big Girl Shoes<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Sometimes when I'm trying to get dressed to go out I have mental breakdowns. I wish I could say that statement was hyperbolic, but I can't. The first time I broke down I had just finished my 7th grade year and had to pick out a cocktail dress to wear to the Bat Mitzvah of a boy I secretly loved; the most recent time was last night, in my 36th year of life. <br />
<br />
I have a little social anxiety, an anxiety exacerbated by certain situations: when I'm the oldest of the group, or the weirdest of the group, or the most liberal of the group, or the heaviest of the group, or the only woman without children of the group, etc. Sometimes I cry in my closet while trying on skinny jeans or sundresses. Sometimes I just go silent in the car on the way to wherever I'm expected. Sometimes a lump forms in my throat when I'm asked to shake hands with a stranger. I'm not the only woman for whom the modern world feels difficult in these ways. <br />
<br />
I always make it through--I credit my parents for "toughening me up," and, more importantly, for teaching me I'm not the center of a room and, therefore, not exempt from social etiquette or manners. I fake it until I make it much of the time. <br />
<br />
Anyway, last night I was beside myself for whatever reason. Part of the problem stemmed from my dog, Max, who in the last few weeks has chewed to bits two pairs of my summer shoes, so I don't have much to choose from. Another part of the problem is the end of the semester. I haven't worked out in weeks, and my school's cafeteria keeps offering fried foods I love and my students keep asking for their stupid grade point averages. So I dug through some old plastic bins of shoes until I found a pair that worked. Michael Kors. On major discount at a second-hand store. High heeled clogs with metal studs in the black leather bands that bridge my feet. So, so sexy. <br />
<br />
I bought those shoes 7 years ago. One night while I was living in New York City and dating a model who I liked more than he liked me, I wore the shoes to a local concert and then out afterward. The heels made me so wobbly that while throwing a dart at a target in the dimmest of dive bars in the East Village, I tripped and fell flat on my face in front of everyone, including the male model. My cousin pulled me aside and asked if I had other shoes I could put on before I tried to bike the ten blocks home to my rental in Greenwich Village. Luckily, I had flip flops. Classy. I like to think plastic flip-flops were urban chic at the time, ironic objects of the underground fashion scene in the Big Apple, but in reality they were just what a clueless, blister-worn Texan might have in her oversize purse. Ugh.<br />
<br />
But something was different with those shoes last night. It was like I had opened an old journal and read back my own wise words to myself years after I'd written them down. The heels I once had trouble balancing in felt better on my feet. I walk more slowly now--I saunter more than flit--so I can step heel to toe, heel to toe, and still appear poised. I've grown up.<br />
<br />
Then this morning my dog tried to chew my "big girl" shoes too. I screamed at him: <i>No! Stop! Give me those! </i> Those shoes matter to me. They are a symbol of something and the something is this: at 28 years old I bought a pair of shoes that I could envision some version of myself wearing although I wasn't ready to wear them yet. <br />
<br />
There's something magical in the idea that we might foresee our own bright future and reach for it even when we're far, far away from deserving it or being prepared for it. I was like my own fairy godmother buying myself a glass slipper I knew I'd fit into someday, somehow, but not that night, not that night. <br />
<br />
And, on a metaphorical level, if you're going to wear big girl shoes, you best be prepared for big girl consequences. That's true in my social life as well as my writing life. I mean, I might fall flat on my face. I often do. The readers of my blog or my published writing might prefer I wear practical, reassuring Mary Janes in some shade of beige or gray or even a respectable red. I should be a good Christian girl if I want to write about God. I really should. There's just this small snafu. I want to show up with spurs or spikes. I want to be something people have to rub up against, something that scratches their skin. I want them to feel...alive, even if bothered. But that means I have to be ready for push-back. I might upset people. I might be turned away for a dress code violation. They might not like me.<br />
<br />
I think of Kim Addonizio's <a href="http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16213">red dress</a>: "I'll wear it like bones or skin/It'll be the goddamn dress they bury me in." Or I think of <a href="http://somuchtofallinlovewith.blogspot.com/2011/01/at-restaurant.html">Stephen Dunn</a>: "Insufficient the merely decent man." Or I think of Elie Weisel: "The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. We must always take sides."<br />
<br />
I'm not here to make you comfortable, although the sweet, Southern girl in me would really like you to feel comfortable. I wish iced tea and endearments could really heal the world.<br />
<br />
They can't. I can't always be nice and decent--not when God is the question at hand. But I can walk down this street in a damn fine pair of high heeled shoes. <br />
<br />
And I probably won't fall.<br />
<br />
<i>Amen.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-17888412954878736572013-05-13T17:08:00.001-07:002013-05-13T17:19:25.546-07:00Sermon Against Any One True God (Or, Sermon for Imagination)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Here's an expression I abhor: one true God. Do you believe in the <i>one true God</i>? <i>One true God</i>: a shibboleth of the evangelical converted, and, for me, my first clue to run like hell for heathen territory where at least the wine runs thick and the sins taste sweet. <br />
<br />
It's the certainty of the phrase that turns me off as well as its thinly veiled neurosis--it's not enough to say "one God" or "true God?" We need two adjectives for good measure? <br />
<br />
Hold on. Rewind. Let me start over and turn down the snark level a bit. Let me start with a story. <br />
<br />
This morning when I opened up my laptop I found a bright yellow "Stickie Note" on the desktop screen. I never use "Stickie Notes," so I knew my husband had jotted down something he wanted to remember. I'm a Gen X kid. He's a Millenial baby. Apparently, somewhere in the narrow space between our two generations, the younguns moved from real Sticky Notes to their technological offspring the "Stickie Note." I didn't even know my computer possessed such a program. His typed note read: <i>God is an opening, not a closing, to the mystery.</i><br />
<br />
"What is that? Who said that?" I asked later.<br />
<br />
"You did," he said. "I didn't want you to forget."<br />
<br />
I forgot. <i> God is an opening, not a closing, to the mystery. </i><br />
<br />
Then I remembered. Last week my husband and I sat talking about my discomfort with Protestant evangelicalism. I kept reworking my words, trying to articulate what I feel viscerally first and intellectually second. <i>I just</i>, I stumbled, <i>I can't</i>...<i>why do they need to be so SURE? To say they know what God is, what God wants, what the Bible means. It lacks.....humility. It lacks....imagination. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
I was thinking of the neuroscientist, David Eagleman, telling my students to "dethrone thyselves." Or I was thinking of Ferdinand de Saussure, "Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things." <br />
<br />
I don't feel anything when someone says <i>one true God</i> except suspicious. Nothing is evoked for me at all, no image, no song. I feel closest to believing in God when God eludes me, when God lives one step beyond my comprehension, or God cracks open a timeworn window and I must squint my eyes against even the thinnest sliver of unbounded light. <br />
<br />
An opening. A crack. Quicksilver slant of light. I buy Christian Wiman's collection of essays, "My Bright Abyss." Even the juxtaposition in the title of the book seems to speak to my conundrum: how can we know God except to know God less and less? Wiman writes<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i>--so too is faith folded into change, is the mutable and messy process of our lives rather than any fixed, mental product. Those who cling to the latter are inevitably left with nothing to hold on to, or left holding on to some nothing into which they have poured the best parts of themselves. Omnipotent, eternal, omniscient--what in the world do these rotten words mean?</i></div>
<br />
Even more rotten words: one true God. Because if we can say "one true God" we can say "one true marriage" or "one true race" or "one true government" or "one true gender" or on, and on, and on like that forever. <br />
<br />
Today I asked my students, "What is the purpose of a seminar discussion?" Today was their last of the semester. They answered quickly, and I cringed to hear my voice inside theirs: to leave the classroom with more questions than answers.<br />
<br />
That's how I want my discussions and dialogues to always go--more questions, more questions, more. That's how I want my students to live. And I guess that's how I want my God too. I want the comfort of incertitude, the solace of knowing I may, at the end of my life, disappear into mystery, into a voice that softly chastens <i>you were wrong</i>, that I may disappear into my own failures and errors, those shadowy places where my soul tried to point me during my earthly heartaches, petty and profound alike, that these darknesses in my life were like the underbelly of the sun, that I might need a divine imagination to turn the world completely over in order to see the bright backside.<br />
<br />
Or in Wiman's words, <i>Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God's means of manifesting himself to us. It follows that any notion of God that is static is--since it asserts singular knowledge of God and seeks to limit his being to that knowledge --blasphemous. </i><br />
<br />
Tell me you don't know and I'll follow you anywhere. <br />
<br />
<i>Amen.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-65719185534036487372013-05-05T18:58:00.001-07:002013-05-09T06:39:35.657-07:00Sermon for Barney<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
"I was talking to Barney the other day," I said to my students one Tuesday morning.<br />
<br />
"Who's Barney?" they asked.<br />
<br />
"Barney the Homeless Guy who lives in my neighborhood."<br />
<br />
One of my students--an eternally nerve-ridden young man, an eager hand-raiser with noticeably pronated feet--opened his mouth a little.<br />
<br />
"Um," he said.<br />
<br />
I waited.<br />
<br />
"You know the homeless guy's name? Why?"<br />
<br />
Why indeed. Why do I know Barney's name? I wish I could say I had the manners to ask him his name since I see him at least twice a week, but no, I can't take credit for any such appreciation for his dignity. My friend and former roommate, a woman with more moral fortitude than me when it comes to strangers, befriended Barney a few years ago when she worked at the local coffee shop.<br />
<br />
Barney scares people. He usually works the corner where our neighborhood dead ends into the Interstate. Unlike other homeless people, he doesn't sit with a cardboard sign or come at your windshield with a spray bottle and rag. Barney storms right up to your driver-side window, his drug-pocked and sun-scraped face inches from the glass, and then turns his hands up in the air and squints his eyes as if he's saying, "Come on, man. What's your f-cking problem?" When the driver doesn't acknowledge his begging, he often throws down his arms and walks away shaking his head; he looks seriously pissed off. Plus, he's got this shock of reddish hair that, unwashed, lifts up from his scalp like a Troll Doll. If you didn't know him, you'd be terrified. I've seen people roll into the U-turn lane at the last second to avoid dealing with him.<br />
<br />
But at his core, Barney is harmless. The last time I saw him, my husband rolled down the window to apologize that we didn't have any change on us, and Barney smiled and said, "No problem. Have a nice day." He really likes our dog. He really likes dogs, period. Dogs are more generous with their affection than humans, after all.<br />
<br />
My student's question--<i>You know his name?</i>--has festered inside me this week, my student's horror that I might be intimately acquainted with a person of ill-repute, even if said person's reputation comes from his housing status and not any really criminal behavior. <br />
<br />
That student sits next to another student, a girl, who once argued in class that we should give homeless people Bible verses instead of money because, for one thing, they need Jesus more than money, and for another thing, they would use the money for untoward purposes anyway. She didn't use the word <i>untoward</i>; she used the words "crack or something."<br />
<br />
Let me offer a quick qualifier: my students are 13 or 14 years old and I'm not sure they need to ask people who scare them for their names. I'm sure their parents have warned them about dangerous adults. And, they're of the uber-privileged variety, my kiddos. They can't and don't want to imagine that good people might fall on bad times. They can't imagine about the homeless man, for example, who told a social worker I know that his wife died and he "just crawled inside a bottle and never came out."<br />
<br />
Mostly, though, my students and many of their adult counterparts in neighborhoods all over this country have not suffered enough yet to know the cruelty of handing a hungry man a Bible verse instead of food or money, the sadistic condescension in thinking that they know what the homeless person will spend his money on or that they should have any opinion on the matter at all. <br />
<br />
Kindness requires empathy, and empathy blooms out of the dark earth of suffering. I'm thinking in particular of a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, "Kindness":<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">Before you know what kindness really is</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">you must lose things,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">feel the future dissolve in a moment</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">like salt in a weakened broth.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">What you held in your hand,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">what you counted and carefully saved,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">all this must go so you know</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">how desolate the landscape can be</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">between the regions of kindness.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">How you ride and ride</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">thinking the bus will never stop,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">the passengers eating maize and chicken</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">will stare out the window forever.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">lies dead by the side of the road.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">You must see how this could be you,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">how he too was someone</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">who journeyed through the night with plans</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">and the simple breath that kept him alive.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">You must wake up with sorrow.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">You must speak to it till your voice</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">catches the thread of all sorrows</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">and you see the size of the cloth.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">only kindness that ties your shoes</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">only kindness that raises its head</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">from the crowd of the world to say</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">it is I you have been looking for,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">and then goes with you everywhere</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f7f7f4; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">like a shadow or a friend.</span><br />
<br />
You must see how this could be you. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore.<br />
<br />
Barney is scary, but he's our scary. I mean, my neighborhood belongs to him as much as it belongs to me. In fact, he arrived before I did. I should know his name. I should take care of him. I should enact those Bible verses I carry inside me rather than handing them out as counterfeit grace. <br />
<br />
I worry less about those afternoons when I recognize Barney under the highway's long shadow than about the day I stop seeing him there. And I should. <br />
<br />
<i>Amen.</i></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-19780173180960615102013-04-28T16:40:00.001-07:002013-04-28T17:50:28.453-07:00Sermon for Blues<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I have a thing for blues. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Long before I ever read Maggie Nelson’s incomparable book,
</span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Bluets</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, I was sure if someone could unlock my soul and paint its portrait,
the outcome would be something like the middle panel of Rothko’s No. 61 Brown
Blue Brown. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Nelson writes that standing in front of an Yves Klein
painting, she thought, “Too much.”
Despite her deep love affair with blue, ultramarine was too much, a kind
of blinding that comes from seeing your own image reflected back at you with so
much force. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Not me. I like
ultramarine. I love its delicious,
cold-cock shock, like when the sun ricochets off reflective glass. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">And today, in Houston, I sit inside a circle of blue trees with their spinal cords painted electric blue. You’d think paint might ruin the trees
natural beauty, but instead, it’s like the painter saw them as they actually
are instead of how them seem to be.
Touched by blue this way they look more like themselves. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If I listed all the things I love that are blue—the North
Atlantic sea, bluebonnets, veins, Byzantine frescoes, bruises, the skies above
football stadiums, my brother’s birthstone, the eyes of the first boys I
wanted, the earth from space, Linda Rondstadt’s voice singing <i>Blue Bayou</i>, my country’s coasts, the people
I love most, iolite and lapis, and now this chapel of crepe myrtles in the
middle of my city—I would never stop.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I’ve tried several times to write about a moment I
experienced with blue. It was seven
years ago. I was in the Natural Science
museum in New York with my brother, in the butterfly room. At the time, I was a little lost, heartsick
and angsty, a woman without her skin. I
heard him gasp, my brother.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Wait, Casey” he said and grabbed the back of my shirt. “Wait.
Just watch.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">He pointed at a butterfly that perched atop a branch, it’s
wings folded, closed. Their tissue paper
skin a dull, soupy brown. He reached out
his finger after a moment and lightly ran it down the butterfly’s
underbelly. It opened its wings, and I
gasped too.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">A quick one-two of blue, blue like nothing I’d seen
before. That color a whisper in our ear:
</span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">where did you think you’d find me? </i><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Brown. Blue. Brown.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">These are the moments that save us. That a God might have my brother, a swimmer,
who in water used to move through the blue with inhuman grace, like a creature with
its heart aflutter, that a God might have my brother unlock it for me. The Blue Morpho. A sea of trees. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">A resting butterfly’s wings resemble nothing if not two
palms pressed together in prayer. And
when they open—that flash of blue—if it’s not God then it’s at least a hint at
why we created one. They say you can tell a lot about a culture by
the Gods its people invent. And perhaps
Voltaire was right. </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait
l’inventer. </i><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Spirit-flutter, soul-burst blue. I want to live and die inside you. </span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Amen. </span><o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-40109800677090944642013-04-21T07:57:00.001-07:002013-04-21T08:13:35.125-07:00Sermon for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">On Friday as I worked my freshman students through poetry revisions and my sophomore students through heavy symbolism in literature, I felt a steady thrum in the back of my head. At each break, I scanned the headlines. Boston was on lockdown and a 19 year old boy on the loose.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Call me crazy, but while everyone else fretted about the city being terrorized, I felt most worried about</span> <span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;">Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;">A picture was forming from the snippets of information reporters puzzled together about the two brothers, and to me it started to become clear that Tamerlan Tsarnaev--the older brother--would emerge as the mastermind and spearhead of the bombing plot. I felt scared for Dzhokhar, 19 and alone after watching police drill his brother with bullets, probably wounded, the gravity and horror of what he'd done finally settling in and nobody to help and nowhere to run. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;">Call me crazy, but I wanted to hug him.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;">Each year when I teach my students Homer's <i>Odyssey</i>, we talk about types and anti-types. In a lesson I stole from my father, we read about the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltway_sniper_attacks">D.C. Sniper</a>--John Muhammed--and his "sidekick", the much younger Lee Boyd Malvo who together in the fall of 2002 embarked on a weeks-long killing spree targeting random citizens standing at gas stations or in parking lots. They killed 13 people. I lived in Washington, D.C. that fall. I remember walking across a parking lot in suburban Virginia where I had traveled to buy furniture for my new efficiency apartment on Thomas Circle. I remember feeling exposed and vulnerable--every white van in the parking lot glared at me, every engine sparking to life or car door slamming shut a signal of my impending death. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">Lee Boyd Malvo was only 17 years old during the murder spree. He was fatherless, in a kind of identity crisis and exile after moving illegally from Antigua to Miami to be with his mother. Both Malvo and Una, his mom, were caught by Border Control in Bellingham, Washington. Separated from his mother, Malvo turned to Muhammed who he knew from when the older man had courted his mother back in Antigua. Here was a father-figure, here a man to guide him into adulthood, here perhaps some solace after too much disorientation and uprootedness. How easily John Muhammed must have indoctrinated his young protegee. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">Just last year, Lee Boyd Malvo--now 28--<a href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-10-25/local/35500020_1_lee-boyd-malvo-sexual-contact-carmeta-albarus">admitted publicly</a> that John Muhammed had sexually abused him for years. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">In class I ask my students, "What if Telemachus had turned to a suitor for mentorship instead of Mentes?" The lesson: young men need good mentors in the absence of fathers, mentors who are, like the character in Homer's epic, divine at their core. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">If Mentor is the type, John Muhammed and Tamerlan Tsarnaev are the anti-types. </span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;">There are two ways to read the <i>Odyssey</i>: as a hero quest full of pomp and circumstance or as a cautionary tale about the ugly and long impact of war and exile. It takes Odysseus ten years to get home to Ithaca after ten years at war in Troy. He does not return a particularly kind or patient man. He is a wounded soldier, a compromised and questionable leader skilled in the art of deception, and a man full of hubris and a desire for revenge, high-risk behavior his modus operandi. But despite its title, the epic begins and ends with Telemachus--19 or so at the start of the poem and by the end, reunited with his father, Telemachus has gone from a pouty teenager, unsure of his name and lineage, to a man with a father to follow. Called by his sense of <i>kleos</i>--patrilineal glory or renown--he follows Odysseus into brutality. He slaughters hundreds of enemies, hangs handmaids by their braids and mutilates the body of a disrespectful goatherd. The slaying of the suitors at the end of the epic is barbarous, unmerciful, and uncivil (my boy students love it, which frightens me), so horrific that Athena has to step in at the end of the story to ensure that civil war doesn't ensue. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;">We can't draw too many parallels yet, but in Boston we have a 19 year old boy whose father is in Russia. We have two sons born in Chechnya, into a place and time of war, uprooted from a country where war has been the norm for decades, where war dislocates and scatters family members who, unlike Odysseus, often never find their way to any real or even metaphorical homeland. We know Tamerlan spent six months in Russia last year and returned to the U.S., perhaps, with the vengeful lust of Odysseus on the sea. We know Dzhokhar idolized his older brother; we know that his brother was his only nearby relative, his only link to family and cultural identity. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;">I'm not saying I don't feel just sick about the the numerous people who lost limbs and loved ones last Monday. I am saying that the trauma of war </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;">is residual and pandemic.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;"> The effects last e</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;">ven decades after the war and persist especially in an age of rising jihadist sentiment and real exile from both healthy avenues toward manhood and identity and from our native countries. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;">Dr. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Shay">Jonathan Shay</a>, a psychiatrist known for his work with war veterans writes, "The fundamental theme of the <i>Iliad</i> and the <i>Odyssey</i> is the human side of war. These are not classics because the professors say they're classics, but because they are so good at revealing us to ourselves."</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;">And Simone Weil once called the <i>Iliad</i> the "purest and loveliest of mirrors."</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;">Literature has something to tell us if we'd only listen. We cannot, any of us, believe that wars end when the white flag goes up. They never end. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;">I'm not saying Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is an innocent victim anymore than Telemachus is innocent or Agamemnon is innocent or any combatant is innocent. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;">I'm saying I wish Dzhokhar had someone other than his wounded, indoctrinated older brother. I wish Lee Boyd Malvo had somebody other than John Muhammed. I'm saying I wish these boys had a true Mentor. I wish that for them, and for the world. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;"><i>Amen. </i></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22px;"><i><br /></i></span>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZvEx2Ukqcds/UXQBnSPLOAI/AAAAAAAABIE/mmJ6ra8ej3U/s1600/Telemachus_and_Mentor1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZvEx2Ukqcds/UXQBnSPLOAI/AAAAAAAABIE/mmJ6ra8ej3U/s320/Telemachus_and_Mentor1.JPG" width="266" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WRqrsT-gp28/UXQBt0fNh1I/AAAAAAAABIU/uR1LczJNgKM/s1600/AP02123001837.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WRqrsT-gp28/UXQBt0fNh1I/AAAAAAAABIU/uR1LczJNgKM/s320/AP02123001837.jpg" width="291" /></a></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-81134996335495208672013-04-14T10:59:00.000-07:002013-04-14T11:51:36.641-07:00Sermon for Silence<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I don't have much to say today, and that's a blessing for all of us. This past week I needed more than anything else the absence of words. All those arbitrary signs for the unspeakable. I wanted to turn everything off: obligations, cerebral acrobatics, the indignities of aging. No laundry. No appointments. No toilet paper or Ibuprofen. No carry-out bags. No everyday horrors like the blank multiple choice line or a woman coveting her neighbor. Just quiet. Just silence.<br />
<br />
So, I offer you this:<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="episode_title" style="border: 0px; clear: right; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 2em; margin: 30px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center;">
<h2 style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 1.8em; font-style: inherit; letter-spacing: -0.005em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
How To Be a Poet</h2>
<div class="author" style="border: 0px; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 0.9em; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1.2; padding: 1em 0px 1.5em;">
by <a href="http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/author.php?auth_id=1441" style="border: 0px; color: #85776d; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Wendell Berry</a></div>
</div>
<div class="work" style="background-image: url(http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/standard/images/twa002/break/break1.gif); background-position: 50% 100%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border: 0px; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px 0px 1.5em;">
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; padding: 0px 0px 1.5em;">
(to remind myself)<br />
<br />
Make a place to sit down.<br />
Sit down. Be quiet.<br />
You must depend upon<br />
affection, reading, knowledge,<br />
skill—more of each<br />
than you have—inspiration,<br />
work, growing older, patience,<br />
for patience joins time<br />
to eternity. Any readers<br />
who like your work,<br />
doubt their judgment.<br />
<br />
Breathe with unconditional breath<br />
the unconditioned air.<br />
Shun electric wire.<br />
Communicate slowly. Live<br />
a three-dimensioned life;<br />
stay away from screens.<br />
Stay away from anything<br />
that obscures the place it is in.<br />
There are no unsacred places;<br />
there are only sacred places<br />
and desecrated places.<br />
<br />
Accept what comes from silence.<br />
Make the best you can of it.<br />
Of the little words that come<br />
out of the silence, like prayers<br />
prayed back to the one who prays,<br />
make a poem that does not disturb<br />
the silence from which it came.</div>
</div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
And this:<br />
<br />
an excerpt from "Into Great Silence", a 2005 documentary about Carthusian monks in the French Alps. An entire film without dialogue, about men who have dedicated their lives to the absence of spoken word. I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen.<br />
<br />
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<i>There are no unsacred places; only sacred places and desecrated places.</i> Let me keep this one sacred. Give me a week or so before I must speak.<br />
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<i>Amen.</i></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-52351962341307830592013-04-07T16:22:00.000-07:002013-04-07T16:24:05.266-07:00Sermon for My Dear Fellow Clergymen<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>My Dear Fellow Clergymen</i>, begins Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s exquisite <i>Letter from a Birmingham Jail. </i><br />
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<i>My Dear Fellow Clergymen</i>.<br />
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When we're studying persuasive rhetoric, I often ask my students to look at the first four words of Dr. King's essay, written as the title implies as he was locked up in a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama in the the spring of 1963. He wrote the letter as a response to one he received from a group of clergymen---pastors, priests, rabbis--urging him to wait for the democratic process to work on its own, to back off from his nonviolent protests of racial injustice, and to implore his followers and other activists to back off as well. <br />
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I tell my students his letter is the single most perfect example of persuasive writing in Western Literature, the culmination of all the author's spiritual and intellectual experience, the clearest articulation of his vocation and soul work. This is my opinion, granted, but I say it to them as fact. I tell them to look at the first four words. Inevitably, they look at the first words of the letter--<i>While confined here in</i>--and not the greeting above them.<br />
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<i>No</i>, I say, <i>look again</i>. <i>The FIRST four words</i>.<br />
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<i>My Dear Fellow Clergymen.</i><br />
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I tell my students Dr. King has already employed a strategy of rhetorical argument. Why doesn't he write, simply, <i>Dear Clergymen</i>? Why does he include "<i>My</i>" and "<i>Dear</i>"? Dr. King, from the get-go, establishes his authority. In those first humble words he places himself at the table with his audience. <i>I am one of you</i>, that greeting announces. <i>I am a man of God. So are you. We are equal. </i><br />
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It's brilliant. Aristotle must have smiled slyly from his grave.<br />
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My students and I read the letter. They struggle--the letter, so sophisticated in its language and rhetorical dexterity, is too high-level for them as sophomores. I know it. But I want to point them toward something they will understand, the emotional lynchpin around which Dr. King spins his ethos and logos: Paragraph 14.<br />
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The most lyrical paragraph of the essay, paragraph 14 centers around one long sentence that uses alliteration, the repetition at the beginning of each syntactical phrase of the words, "When you have seen." I don't think Dr. King's slip into second person is accidental: he places his listener in the shoes of black people. The paragraph reads:<br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." <b>But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.</b><i> </i>There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."</span></span><br />
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When I read Paragraph 14 aloud to my students, a silence bears down on the room. I have trouble keeping my voice stable. I have trouble keeping my breath as I attempt to recite the sentences with the same urgency and speed with which he has written them. Every time, my heart breaks a little.<br />
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What does Paragraph 14 have to do with anything now?<br />
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Well, I have been reticent about addressing the most recent media storm about gay rights, catalyzed by the Supreme Court's review of California's Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act. I am not hesitant because I do not know, definitively, where I stand, but because so many knee-jerk and sub-intellectual reactions already exist in the digital universe.<br />
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This week the <i>New York Times</i> editorial board published an editorial piece admonishing Ruth Ginsberg for her comments that the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion "moved too far, too fast." I was so relieved. As a woman first, and then as a supporter of gay rights. I understand what she meant; I understand what other constitutional lawyers have been arguing about gay rights: let the democratic process unfold naturally, it's already leaning in favor of gay marriage, let the verdict fall state-by-state lest we spark a backlash. Their position is a practical position, but, to me, it's an immoral position too. <br />
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In all the back and forth I couldn't help but think of Dr. King. I know the details differ in these fights, as race differs from sexuality. I know the powers need different truths spoken to them. Still I couldn't help but think of Paragraph 14. I have my own version. <i>When you have seen your friends cast from their families; when you have seen an otherwise loving mother say to her daughter, "You may come to Easter, but you may not bring HER"; when you have seen your own conservative grandmother offer acceptance to her gay daughter; when you have heard the epithets and catcalls of your gender's own persecution--bitch, pussy--spit at homosexuals on the street, </i><i>when you have seen too and recognized what loves sees; </i><i>when you have seen the singular beauty of the hanger hook line drawn up from a woman's ribcage, between her breasts, and around the sharp edges of her clavicles; when you have felt the sting of a man so unable to publicly love another man that he carves through women's hearts as though they wrote the Constitution; when you have seen, when you have seen, when you, when you, when you....</i><br />
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But Dr. King remains even in death a better writer than me. And, unlike I pretend, he actually possessed a theological ordination. He was a clergyman. <br />
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I hear his voice as I teach it. This year, 50 years after he penned his masterpiece from behind cold metal bars in the city at the hot core of our country's wounds, clergymen everywhere should listen to his voice.<br />
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<i>There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. </i><br />
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Amen.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-68564436178594104432013-03-31T07:21:00.002-07:002013-03-31T07:27:22.646-07:00Easter Sermon<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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In the struggle between light and dark, I'm not sure light should win.<br />
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I don't mean good and evil here; I don't believe in that dichotomy much. I mean that the Easter holiday often infects me with vertigo and a little sugar sickness: all those pastels, the flowers, the eggs, the good news. It's so all so nauseatingly chipper. So loud. So light. So much levity. </div>
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That sounds worse than I maybe really feel. Things I do love about Easter: big hats on old women, little girls in patent leather shoes, the blessed weather. </div>
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Let me back up.</div>
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Let me talk about good news.</div>
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All about town the marquis reads "He is Risen!" and the blossoms bloom so bright they quiver from their very roots. From the megaphone of the Internet, joyful headlines and status updates and photos of purple baskets stuffed to the gills with chocolate malt balls, plastic eggs, and fat bunnies abound. </div>
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These things tell us we have something to celebrate, an exuberant thing, a happy thing. </div>
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Perhaps. But in the Easter story, I am more moved by death than life, by the story's no-nonsense acknowledgment of suffering more than its assurance of Christ's resurrection as our salvation. I'm bothered actually by the dichotomy he/we in "He died for our sins," since the Easter story, to me, is nothing if not a mirror held up to the world, a kind of cosmic looking glass. If they insist on cheer, I wish the signs read "We are Risen!" </div>
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I am drawn to the darkness. The quiet consolations. The crepuscular. I love the Stations of the Cross, for example. </div>
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The two most reassuring moments in the Easter story for me are somber moments:</div>
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1. The moment in the Gospel of Mark, when Jesus cries out from the deepest dark of his pain on the cross,"Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?", translated in English as "<i><b>My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?</b></i>" Mark is the only gospel that includes this quote from Jesus, so who knows about its veracity, but I am less interested in factual truth than story-truth, in particular truth than universal truth. In the contest of authorship, Mark wins. His story has Jesus ask the ultimate question of all sufferers--why am I alone?--and in voicing our most human fear, Jesus assures us we are not alone. He is with us in our suffering. </div>
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This moment of all Biblical moments is a sublime example of empathy. One definition of empathy is <i>the</i> <i>imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it. </i>The best stories allow our subjective suffering to infuse others; or conversely, to see others as infused with our own grief. <i> </i>My subjective suffering infused into the body of Jesus so that he feels what I feel. Stories, then, become the great equalizer, as death is too. </div>
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I do not need Jesus to save me from sin, so I much as I need a presence bigger than myself to sit with me in my darknesses. The best stories do not entertain us or cheer us up so much as console us, and consolation does not come in pastels, at least not for me.</div>
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2. If stories console us, then they behave as salves. The other Easter moment I love--a moment documented by all four gospel stories--is the moment after Jesus' death when a man named Joseph of Arimathea bravely asks Pontius Pilate for the body of Jesus. Joseph wraps the body in linen and carries it to the tomb. Outside the tomb, women sit and pay witness. </div>
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That we may all have someone dress our wounds, tend to our bodies when they're most frail. May we all have someone watch, listen, witness, and mourn, a woman or two to say "I see what has happened to you. I hear you. I see you."</div>
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The best stories sit with us in the pitch of night before the dawn. They are soul-salves, wrapped around our broken spirits like Joseph's linen cloths around the dead body of Christ. </div>
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Once in my youth I went to a Sarah McLachlan concert--laugh if you want. I'm showing my age and my ridiculousness. I was 18, suffused with sorrow and confusion, and I remember she said on stage, "I try to write happy songs, but it never works. The sadder the song, the better I feel."<br />
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I just finished reading Joe Landsdale's excellent, deeply gothic mystery novel, "The Bottoms." At the end, the main character Harry, looking back on his life, says, "Life's like that. It isn't like one of Grandma's murder mysteries. Everything doesn't get sewn up neatly."</div>
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I don't know why we want to sugarcoat everything, literally and figuratively. I want the messiness before we sew everything up neatly, before the resurrection. We need to celebrate darkness too, because then we'll feel less alone when we find ourselves incapable of joy, we'll feel less defective, less like failures. We'll feel consoled. If that's not good news, then I don't know what.<br />
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Happy Easter.</div>
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<i>Amen.</i><br />
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In honor of darkness and empathy, here are a few very dark, very satisfying pieces of art I'm drawn to lately if anyone wants to feel better:</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-56575473887720575952013-03-25T11:03:00.000-07:002013-03-25T11:42:31.130-07:00Sermon Against Striving <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;">When I finished my MFA program in Creative Writing at the age of 30, I began to fret. I had no book deal. I had no money. I had no boyfriend or husband or child. I had no job. What had I been working so hard toward? I walked around in a perpetual state of anxiety mostly thinking, "I should have gone to law school."</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">One day I expressed my anxiety to my father the way I normally express it: through comparison. <i>Such-and-such friend got accepted to <a href="http://www.middlebury.edu/blwc">Breadloaf</a> or got an agent for his novel</i>, I'd say. And <i>such and such friend is pregnant</i>. <i>So and so from high school has a retirement plan</i>. I'll never forget his response. He told me, "Casey. Just because you went to graduate school, doesn't mean you have to be a writer. It is a gift for anyone to have three years to spend learning a craft. Even if you never get a book deal, your time honing your craft will not have been for nothing. It will have enriched your life."</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Another mentor--a poet whose young daughter I cared for--told me
something similar. She said, "Don't apply to writing conferences. Don't look outward like so many young authors for validation. Just
write something good." </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In both cases I was released briefly from my constant state of striving. Their words worked in direct counterpoint to the aims of an English professor I had in college who was so rigid and joyless in her expectations for essays and class discussion and intellectual achievement that I still hate Romantic poetry and prose. This martinet of a teacher--her grey perm looked like an armored helmet--almost kept me soured me on literature classes and writing for the rest of my life. It took me 6 years, 2 degrees, and 3 jobs to return to writing after her stupid class.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I teach students who live in a constant state of striving--work harder, get better grades, run faster, do more, achieve, achieve, achieve. I feel exhausted just listening to them talk. I also empathize. But, mostly, I want to scream at them to stop striving. I want to slap them across their faces like I'm Cher in <i>Moonstruck</i>, and say, "Snap out of it."</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Because....what are we striving for?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I'm not making an argument against rigor or discipline here--those practices serve us well, but they work best when they arise from calm and a sense of perspective rather than from desperate urgency or unchecked, egoistic desire. Or, at least they do for me. I tried to explain this once to an ex-boyfriend, another writer. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I said, "I write better when I imagine that I can affect a small audience. I'd be happy with a column or a book read by smart people. I'm better when I'm unshackled from achievement. I don't necessarily think I'm good enough to win the Pulitzer, and that's okay with me."</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">He said, "Really? I wouldn't be able to keep writing if I DIDN'T believe I was good enough to win the Pulitzer Prize."</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I should have broken up with him right then and there, but I would have "failed" at keeping the relationship going and I was a hardcore striver, you see, so failure was not an option. (P.S. Surprise, surprise, we failed anyway, and thank God for that). </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Yesterday I sat through a yoga teacher training about spinal anatomy. During the session I learned that the pelvic bones do not fully fuse in humans until the late teen years, for males sometimes as late as 21 years of age. The point? That asking teenagers to perform repetitive movements that cause strain (weight-lifting, for example) can warp the bones before fusion, causing all kinds of lifelong posture and mobility problems. Children are meant to play, not perform or achieve. This, of course, doesn't mean they won't achieve or have successes or learn or grow, but the constant striving toward achievement can damage them. And if science shows the possibility for damage in their physical bodies from too much striving, what about their emotional and intellectual beings?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">And speaking of science, neuroscientist David Eagleman spoke to teachers and students at my school today about the unconscious brain. One thing he said resonated with me: <i>the unconscious mind can do all kinds of things that the conscious mind interferes with.</i> What is a constant state of striving for achievement if not the conscious mind placing demands on the often unconscious work of art-making or idea-generation? Eagleman also reiterated again and again the importance of emotional salience in work and learning. Students (and humans in general) perform better--achieve more--when the tasks required of them engage them emotionally. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">What are the ramifications of all this on writing and the teaching of writing? For me, the following:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">1. The more I "strive" to be a better teacher, if said striving means constant anxiety about adhering to and successfully completing a tight list of objectives limited to the scope of academia, the more I'm going to exhaust myself and do a disservice to my students. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">2. We adults can set the expectations for young people. We can say with our actions, words, and demeanor and with our own life choices that intellectual play, intellectual integrity, and intellectual risk matter more than intellectual achievement. We can keep their intellectual "bones" healthy so that when they finally fuse they function correctly and facilitate rather than hinder movement. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">3. I can ask my students to love reading and writing at an unconscious, emotional and visceral level first before I then direct their conscious, striving minds to interfere. For a great manifesto on this, read Dean Bakopoulos' "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/books/review/straight-through-the-heart.html?pagewanted=all">Straight Through the Heart</a>."</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">4. In my own life, I can wake up everyday and know that I am enough. I am enough. My life is enough and always was. And then I can work hard. But my decision to work hard must stem from a real awareness of my internal worth, from the core of my soul, rather than from a list of elusive, ever bigger accomplishments. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">5. We must all play. We must all rest. These actions are not wastes of time. They are vital, nourishing, and preeminent. Maintaining respect for play and rest is quite different from settling for mediocrity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">6. We should all get a "B" at least once in our lives, in school and in life. It builds our characters and teaches us resilience. Sometimes getting a "B" or "C" is also a nice way to say "Screw you" to things and people that don't really matter.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"> <span style="line-height: 115%;">I
don’t think any teacher can make all her students amazing writers, and striving to do so might kill her. Aiming for the Pulitzer Prize might kill me too. But I think each student and each piece of writing I put into the world matters,
because I believe in stories—their power to make sense of fact, their power to
create meaning and hope for people.
Stories offer us solace, because they give us characters into whose
shoes we can safely step for a while. Novels,
stories and poems speak to our whole person.
They open up the rusty doorways that lead to empathy and communion, an opening that is critical for adolescents who are trying to navigate the newly
complex world around them. Learning to
read and write well offers us a <i>way</i>
of thinking that is invaluable, regardless of whether it makes us any money or gets us into the Ivy League. My father said this to me in his words. Rainier Maria Rilke
also speaks to the value of every person learning a craft in his <u>Letters to
a Young Poet</u> when he writes, “But after this descent into yourself and into
your solitude, perhaps you will have to renounce becoming a poet…Nevertheless,
even then, this self-searching that I ask of you will not have been for
nothing.”</span></span>
</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">And, you might just achieve something along the way. </span></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="line-height: 115%;">Amen. </span></i></span>
</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<br /></div>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/0x-fkSYDtUY" width="420"></iframe>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-29088228591506604762013-03-17T08:24:00.000-07:002013-03-17T08:56:11.975-07:00Sermon for a Girl in Steubenville, Ohio<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lord, have mercy.</span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I've been following the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/us/rape-trial-in-steubenville-ohio.html?hp&_r=0">rape trial</a> of a girl in Steubenville, Ohio who has accused two football players of "digital penetration." In Ohio, as in some other states, the legal definition of rape includes penetration with fingers, or other foreign objects. Yesterday, this 16 year old girl testified for two hours about what she doesn't remember from that night and the social media shit-storm (a video the boys posted to YouTube of her naked in a basement, etc.) that she used to piece together what happened to her. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I was struck by two things:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">1. We all have to piece together our trauma, refracted as it is by the mishappen glass of our memories. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">2. The <i>New York Times</i> writes: "<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;">Mr. Mays and Mr. Richmond were rising stars in the football program, and some Steubenville residents have complained about a culture that protects the team. Others say the girl, her supporters and the news media have blown the episode out of proportion."</span> <i>Have blown the episode out of proportion</i>. My heart feels its fault lines move. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I have been this girl. I am this girl. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Instead of completing this post, I want to include an memoir piece I wrote years ago, first published in the literary journal, <i><a href="http://www.msupress.msu.edu/journals/fg/">Fourth Genre</a></i>, in the spring of 2007. It's much longer than a blog post, but if you'd like to read it, I'll embed the text here for you. Please keep in mind that I subscribe to Tim O'Brien's idea: <span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; line-height: 18px;"><i>I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. </i></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; line-height: 18px;"><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></i></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">These things happened to me. But I love my friends and family, so some of the characters are composites, some things omitted, some things blurred. </span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">I offer this to her, that girl in Steubenville. Brave girl. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><i>Amen.</i></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><b>Take Me With You</b></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">by Casey Fleming</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<i>If I could tell this story as my former self I
would. If I could tell it in your words. But I can’t. I hardly know you
anymore. I hardly know the place you come from, the place you live, the place I
loved once. If I could tell the truth, I would do that too.This is my truth—not
yours.You would have kicked and screamed at some of the things I will say about
you and your native home, about your parents. No, you were not a screamer.You would
have grieved quietly, and alone, as usual.You might have—maybe—written an
enigmatic sentence or two in your journal and then laid your head down for a
restless sleep.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>What haunt me are the things you will never
know.You will never know that the woman I am now wants to tell you, </i>it’s
okay, you’re okay<i>. I need you to believe me.</i><i> </i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;">
<o:p>** </o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
Houston. September, 1992. The football boys were
already lined up around the edge of the pool, their feet dangling in the water,
splashes shattering into the air like fireworks. They were a happy bunch.
Rachel hissed into your ear, <i>Oh, GOD, this is going to be embarrassing.
Look, look. Mike is right in front of the diving board! </i>Rachel let out a
squeal that annoyed you. It seemed childish, and on this day you wanted to be
anything but a child.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
Your new bathing suit had padded lining, so your
boobs, at least at first glance, appeared to stick out further than your rib
cage. You tugged at the elastic edges, already self-conscious about having a
significantly larger back- side than other 15-year-old girls. Only three weeks
earlier Joe Kleinfelder told you that you looked like a pear—little on top and
big on the bottom. You wanted to be mad, but deep down knew he was right. <i>It’s
okay</i>, he said, <i>the black guys will like you</i>. Your biggest fear that
day, besides being a child, was being too much of a woman. You couldn’t imagine
anything much
worse than your ass hanging out the back of your bikini for the whole
free world to see.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
You and her friends had planned for this day—you
all knew it was com- ing. Drill team initiation. No one could dance during
football season, unless they went through this process. The current members of
the team prepared you: you learned a special dance, a song to sing, and a
certain way to swing your hips, the perfect form to use when jumping, in full
straddle, from the high diving board. Each girl was to dance, by herself,
around the deep end of the pool where the players eagerly anticipated the show,
climb up the ladder to the high dive, and sing the required song before
jumping. The players formed a fence around the deep end and stared toward the
div- ing board, awaiting this performance; the sweat of their muscled shoulders
gleamed; their lower legs disappeared into the water. <i>We all went through it</i>,
the elder girls assured the freshman, <i>it’s supposed to be embarrassing</i>. <i>You’ll
sur- vive</i>, said Allison Cauldwell. Allison was your “big sister,” a
sophomore, so she had already been initiated last year. Like you, Allison had a
crush on Mike McCormick, but she also put hand-decorated picture frames and a
gold-and-black teddy bear in your welcome basket that morning, so you didn’t
confide in her that Mike walked you to your locker every day after sixth
period, and that sometimes his hand slid across your lower back when he left
you.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
When you first arrived Coach Ryan greeted you. <i>Howdy,
little one. Where’s your mama? </i>You told him she was at a swim meet with
your brother. Coach Ryan was friends with your mother, who taught down the hall
from him in the science wing of your high school.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
Rachel giggled again. Amy Howard complained to her
mother, a chap- erone, that she didn’t want to do it. That she couldn’t do it.
Her voice cracked, but her mother pushed her into line behind Rachel and said, <i>Oh,
Amy</i>. You felt sorry for her— Amy never wore shirts that didn’t cover her
stomach, or shorts that ended above her knees, and she limited her makeup to
mascara. Today she was the only girl wearing a one-piece swimsuit.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
You scanned the crowd of players for a familiar
face. Mike McCormick caught your eye briefly and smiled—a gentle smile and then
a quick wave. For a second, you felt safe because you remembered what Mike’s
hand felt like on your thigh the other day in Spanish class, when he asked you
for a pen. It felt warm, and strong, and seeped through your jeans like hot
water.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
Hallie Spencer was the first girl to go. The rest
of you coerced her into being the guinea pig because you knew she’d get more
applause than anyone else. She had a killer body. Her voice was unnaturally
soft, almost broken, when she stood at the edge of the board and sang: <i>I’m a
gopher girl and I always gopher guys, and when they don’t gopher me, I always
wonder why</i>. Then she crossed her hands over her chest when she jumped, and
so couldn’t touch her toes on the straddle jump like she was supposed to. The
football players booed and cracked up. Hallie slowly emerged and broke the
surface of the water, her painstakingly hair-sprayed bangs slapped tight to her
forehead.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;">
**</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>I ran into one of those football players not too
long ago. I saw him at some shady night club I was coerced into visiting by some
of my old high school friends. Marcus— a black football player, also voted Best
Looking Male of your graduating class.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>I expected him to be as you described him to me:
arrogant, dismissive, cocky. But instead he too seemed uninterested in the club
patrons, the neon disco globes, the bad DJ. He pulled me into a corner booth
and asked a lot about my life. He remembered you fondly. I told him about the
East Coast, and he filled me in on the West Coast. He’d been living in L.A. the
past three or four years.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
You’ll see me<i>, he said, </i>on the next season
of <i>The Bachelorette</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
Get out! <i>I said</i>. So, it’s already been
filmed. Can’t you tell me what happens?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
No. I’m under contract.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
I bet you make it to the final round. Obviously,
you don’t win, because you’re not married<i>, I said.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>He winked.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>A few months later I sat all my closest friends
down in my apartment living room to watch </i>The Bachelorette<i>, a
silly show about a young woman who picks a hus- band from a group of bachelors
the TV station has chosen for her. Marcus only made it to round two. I was
surprised, but Avé, my most honest friend, said,</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
“Yeah, right. They always get rid of the black guy
on the second episode. They don’t want to appear racist by cutting him the
first round, so they wait until the second. But they sure as hell don’t want to
bring a black guy home to mama, let alone the national viewing public.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;">
** </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
You can’t remember much of your turn, except for
the bile threatening its way up your throat and the heart’s endless hammering.
You were, however, keenly aware of the way your bathing suit rode up in the
back as your hips popped from side to side. You climbed the diving board. You had
to go slowly because your legs shook. You walked to the end and sang your song.
You sent up a quick prayer that when you straddled the air your pubic hair
didn’t hangout. Somehow you hadn’t anticipated anything after the jump—that
blessed freefall. Under water, all you could see were the players’ swollen
calves and feet in all directions, so you swam toward the shallow end of the
pool to avoid them, and watched from there while Rachel, and Maria, and poor
Amy Howard, and Gabriela, and Latisha, and everyone else took their turn. Each
of their tender bodies glowed briefly against the blank, hot sky and you wanted
to remember them that way: frozen in time above the diving board.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;">
<o:p>** </o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>When I went North for college, I entered the
first-year class of Smith College the same year that fellow Texan Ruth Simmons
took office there as the first black pres- ident of an Ivy League school. The
Houston Chronicle headline read: </i>Making History.<i>The newspaper
explained:</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
When she is installed as president of Smith College
on September 30, Ruth Simmons, the great-great-granddaughter of slaves and the
daughter of Texas sharecroppers, will become the first black woman to head a
top- ranked college in the United States.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>I told some women there your story. I joined a
group called Rape Awareness and was promptly assured that your story did not
qualify, and more importantly, that everyone knows what kind of girls become
cheerleaders. A young woman with a shaved head and thrift store clothing and a
house on Martha’s Vineyard told me I could support survivors but not be one, as
though I was trying to join a sorority. I tried to explain the difference
between a cheerleader and a drill team colonel, but at the end of the day, they
both have pompoms.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>Ruth Simmons and I went North together, experienced
the heaviest snowfall of the century that first fall semester. I did not even
own a scarf.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>My senior year, after someone had drawn a stick
figure hanging from a noose on the marker board outside a black student’s dorm
room, the Black Students Alliance organized a rally. I attended. So did Ruth.
None of us expected her. If I could explain to you the composure and grace and
quiet strength this woman exuded every day, you might understand why we all
adored her so much. How many student bod- ies do you know that erupt into
applause every time their college president enters a room? If I could explain
to you the example of success and refinement she offered us, you might
understand the vast silence, and the quickening pulse of the crowd when she
began, unabashedly, to cry, as she said into the microphone: </i>I moved
away from Houston a long time ago, and I had hoped that I would never see
anything like this outside of the South. I believed this place was different.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;">
<b>** </b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
After everyone took their turn jumping off the
diving board, the players and elder drill team members joined you all to play
in the shallow end of the pool. All you recall is a number of baritone voices
and tanned bodies all around, and being pushed toward the center of the group. <i>They’ll
throw you in the air</i>, someone yelled to you—you think maybe Hallie. <i>It’s
fun</i>. Then you were there with all their big hands everywhere, sliding
across your skin, slithering, preparing you to be launched. You balled yourself
up to be shot into the air like a cannonball. It was only a split second, but
your skin crawled and you realized your bikini bottom was creeping up and you
felt something like a tampon, but harder, alive, moving—a finger, then sev-
eral fingers, then somebody else’s fingers—and then a moment of nothing but
bright blue before you hit the water again. For a brief second, you expected to
see a brownish cloud appear in the water between your legs, and then you
thanked God you weren’t hurt bad enough to bleed.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
At the other end of the pool you coughed up water
and then told Rachel. <i>Someone stuck their fingers</i>, you whispered. She
threw you a wild- eyed look, but she also touched your arm. <i>Someone stuck
their fingers inside me</i>. <i>And moved them around</i>. Thighs clamped
shut—hers and yours—and then there was the commotion.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
Allison Cauldwell was crying on the side of the
pool, her wet blonde hair turned a slimy shade of green, and directors’ and
coaches’ mouths moved in a mad frenzy. The football players shook their heads
and threw their hands up like <i>we don’t know what you’re talking about</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>Please stop crying Allison</i>, you
thought, <i>you’re making a scene</i>. Rachel whis- pered, <i>do you think they
did it to her too? </i>And then it did became a scene: mothers hastily plucking
their daughters out of the water, Ms. Bates—the drill team director—screaming
at Coach Ryan about protecting her“girls,” a few angry football players
pointing fingers or standing quietly in the background with their eyes nailed
to their feet.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;">
<o:p>** </o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>In college I took a class that reminded me of you.
Gender in the African American Community.To this day, I swear that it was my
best college course, even though it wasn’t at Smith College</i>—<i>it
was during the fall semester of my year at the University of Texas. I also
swear that Professor Anderson, with his brown skin and sea-green eyes, was the
best teacher I ever knew and the first in a long string of pro- fessor-crushes
I would have in my adulthood. He drew a triangle on the blackboard and at each
of three points wrote the words in scrawling letters: </i>race, class, gender<i>.
Then he asked the men in the class, mostly athletes and black, if they thought
racism or sexism a worse crime.They laughed.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>One Tuesday I raised my hand to point out that the
Black Panthers treated their female members like slaves. I felt mean when I
said it, but my voice did not quiver. I actually used the word </i>slaves<i>.When
the men began to argue with me—vehe- mently—Professor Anderson raised his right
hand high into the air to silence them. </i>I think she has a good point<i>, he
said in his calm, velveteen voice.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>I thought of you then. I couldn’t help it.That tiny
scar I have somewhere inside me pulsed and grew pink—it ached as though it
could sense a heavy storm on the horizon.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;">
<i>** </i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
Monday morning at school gossip whirled through the
halls in hurricane fashion, turning heads, slamming lockers, and raising
voices. <i>Allison is leav- ing school, she’s switching schools</i>, someone
told you. Rachel passed you a note in biology: <i>Allison’s parents came into
the building this morning, all hell is about to break loose</i>. Her face
barely contained her excitement when she slid the note over your desk. And then
Corey Locklin, a cheerleader, told several girls at your lunch table that
DeAndre Lewis did it, and Allison’s parents wanted him expelled and maybe
charged.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
DeAndre Lewis. His name did not ring a bell. But
you envied Allison her memory. In your mind, those fingers inside you had many
faces—all those hands, how could you have connected them to one specific face?
Your perpetrator looked like a team, not a person.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
During sixth period you wondered if Mike would meet
you outside class, whether he would pretend to have passed by with friends as
usual, and whether he might hold your hand this time. Sometime between <i>Great
Expectations </i>and semicolons, a student aide popped her head into your
English classroom—<i>excuse me</i>, she said, <i>Ms. Jackson wants to see Casey
Fleming in her office.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
The walk to Ms. Jackson’s office was long, and
abnormally quiet, so quiet you could hear each footstep as it rattled the
lockers and echoed. Ms. Jackson was an assistant principal and in all your
years of schooling you had never been called to a principal’s office for any
reason. And she was not just any assistant principal—other students warned of
her potential for mean- ness. She had pale skin and her hair was huge and
curly; most people referred to her by her student-given nickname: the Fro Ho.
Although it seemed unlikely, you couldn’t help but feel as though you were in
trouble, so you pulled hard on your lower lip and your bladder tightened.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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Jackson’s office when you arrived: Coach Ryan, an assistant football coach
whose name you never knew but who had deep acne scars pocked into his cheeks
and forehead, Ms. Jackson, and Corey Locklin.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>Casey, come on in and sit down.This is about the
Drill Team Initiation this past Saturday.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
Ms. Jackson looked up briefly at Coach Ryan as if
they shared some secret. Her enormous hair cast shadows on the wall behind her.
Coach Ryan nodded.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>Something unfortunate happened, I understand, and I
don’t want to pressure you, but Corey here informed us that you may have been
involved as well?</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
The only thing you knew about Corey Locklin was
that she had a huge forehead, went to fake tanning beds, and had an alcoholic
mother who wore gaudy, jewel-heavy rings on her fingers. She was not your
friend.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>Corey</i>, Coach Ryan interjected, <i>thank
you for being so honest with us and concerned about your friend.You can go now.
Go on. Git.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
Corey left and as she closed the door her hair
swung over her shoulder—it reminded you of a hand-painted fan your grandmother
brought back from China, black and very thick.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>Casey.We need you to tell us exactly what happened
to you.Allison’s parents are very upset.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
You told them what you could.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>Thank you. I understand this is hard, but we need
you to tell us exactly where he touched you. Don’t be embarrassed to use the
word.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
The voice you used then—<i>vagina?</i>—sounded like
a stranger’s voice and your insides cringed to hear it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>Okay, now. Coach Ryan here is prepared to kick
DeAndre off the team and speak to his parents. Does that sound okay to you?</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>I don’t know. </i>Coach Ryan’s smile scared
you<i>. I don’t—I can’t be sure it was him. Just him, I mean. I couldn’t
tell.There were so many people.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>But was it a black boy? With a gold tooth? I don’t—probably. DeAndre?
We need at least two witnesses to take any action. I don’t know. </i>The
air-conditioner’s whirring rubbed up against the silence. The leather chair
squeaked against your jeans. Everyone waited for you to say something more, but
you didn’t.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;">
<b>** </b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>The things you confessed to me years later: There
were more black players than white on the football team.You never knew many of
their names.There were only 3 black girls on the entire 70-member drill team,
and no black cheerleaders. After that day, you never dated Mike McCormick.You
wanted it to be DeAndre.You wanted to blame him too. It would have made
everything easier.You had a night- mare that night that would reoccur
throughout your adulthood. In it, you drive a car up the Sam Houston Tollway,
where it climbs up and up before splitting off into </i><i>I</i><i>-10 East
and </i><i>I</i><i>-10 West.Your brakes give out, you can’t turn right
or left.You crash through the barrier and go flying off the end of the highway
into a sheet of clouds.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;">
<o:p>** </o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
After you returned to class, and the bell rang, you
saw Mike standing against the wall, alone, staring right at you. He did not
even pretend to be passing by with friends. The two of you walked in silence.
You walked all the way down the stairs and out the front entrance of the
building together. In contrast to the cold inside of the school, the daylight
shimmered, the warm wind raced, and you could hear the flags—Texas and the
U.S.—clap in counterpoint against the flag pole. This sound comforted you until
Mike finally whispered, <i>Corey Locklin says that you told everyone it
happened to you too, but that you just wanted attention. </i>Casey<i>, tell me
the truth</i>—his blue eyes burned red, which made your stomach ache and you
wanted so badly to kiss him then—<i>did that nigger hurt you too?</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;">
<o:p>** </o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>That same year I had my crush on Professor
Anderson, I started to date Al Samson, an old friend from middle school, from
before drill team. He was beautiful, a base- ball player, and had loved me
since we were ten years old. His skin was so black, so very black, that the
tiny wrinkles around his eyes shimmered and moved, spider webs or rivers. If I
were a fish, or a dragonfly, I could have crawled right inside them and
disappeared.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>I want to tell you this. Sometimes it makes me
angry with you. A bottomless, raging angry.When Al held my hand, or touched my
body, the skin on his palms felt rough, foreign, like sandpaper. He never knew
but it scared me, his skin. If he woke me in the night, when I least expected
it, and pressed a coarse hand to my back, my body trembled and, I swear to you,
I could not tell if it was love or fear.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>My friend would tell me years later that I
exoticized Al, and maybe she’s right, and maybe that’s the real source of my
anger. Because when I was 12 he was Al who passed me notes in Spanish, and Al
who sat with me on the school bus, and Al who</i> <i>laughed way down deep in his
throat, and I have no memory at all of what his skin felt like next to mine. I
only remember that it made me happy.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;">
<i>** </i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
You went home that night shaken. When you arrived
you walked down the skinny front hallway lined with family photos and then took
your shoes off and placed them toe to toe next to your father’s, mother’s, and
brother’s shoes, already abandoned there by the side table. Yours were by far
the smallest. Your father sat in his usual spot, on the right side of the
couch, TV remote control in hand, glasses perfectly perched on his nose.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>How was school, Sister Girl? </i>your
father asked. He meant it. He was that kind of parent, not the kind who asked
because they were supposed to. He really wanted to know.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>Fine</i>, you said in a small voice.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
This is the important part of your story. Because
you told him then, about the pool, about the principal’s office. And your
mother appeared from behind the kitchen counter to listen. But you must not
have said it clearly, or loudly enough, because neither of them got sad.
Neither of them got angry. Neither of them pulled you to them in a rush of
parental empa- thy. You got no ice cream, no chicken fingers and French fries
(your favorite meal), no nothing. Your father looked at you perhaps a little
longer than usual—in that way he did when he was studying something. But that
was it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
You didn’t cry. Maybe that’s why they didn’t know
to react, since you were the kind of girl who cried easily and often. Maybe if
you had shed a tear an alarm would have gone off—a high-pitched, steely one and
your father would have asked you to sit next to him on the couch and your
mother would have ripped someone at the school a new asshole for not bringing
her into the principal’s office from her classroom down the hall, for daring to
interview her daughter without her mother there to protect her.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
But you didn’t cry. You thought maybe what happened
wasn’t so bad. Maybe what happened was part of growing up and you, a perfect A
stu- dent, couldn’t bear to fail at that. You thought maybe you did something
wrong too.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
Your parents laughed out loud together at a sitcom
on television, and everything fit neatly into its place. The fan above your
heads hummed at its usual rhythm and the sun fell in squares from the French
doors onto the car- pet. So you went to your bedroom, closed the door, and fell
into the bed.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
Lying there, you remembered all their faces—Corey
Locklin’s proud eyes and black, black hair, Coach Ryan’s patient and
encouraging but stiff smile, and Ms. Jackson’s expectant, hopeful prodding. And
you remem- bered walking out of the office and the heavy door taking its time
to close behind you, and the way you stood outside it looking down the tunnel of
endless orange lockers, and how you felt then such a darkness.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;">
**</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>At one of Al’s baseball games in college I tried to
tell your mother again what hap- pened to you.This time she did cry; so did I.
She didn’t believe that you ever told her—she swore she would remember that. I
ended up consoling her, because her response to sadness is always anger first
and she yelled at me. She accused you of having an exaggerated adolescent sense
of drama; she doubted your recount of events. Luckily, we were separated from the
other spectators, sitting on our own splintery wooden bleachers along the first
base line.Al stood in the outfield, his dark skin shiny in the humid,
thick-as-syrup mid-evening heat. From his vantage point, we were nothing more
than pale outlines that stood every once in a while to cheer for a great throw
or catch, then sat, then stood and sat again.We could sense when we were sup-
posed to do this without paying any attention at all.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>He could not have seen our blotchy faces, all
shades of red and pink, mine lined in mascara, my mother’s streaked only with
salt.You would have felt betrayed by her outbursts and denials, but I
understood her heart was breaking. I could see by the way she gripped the
bleacher, her knuckles impossibly white.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>I believed her when she said that she would have
done something had she heard you the first time. She is the kind of mother that
acts, and reacts, relentlessly, and pushes her children to be as relentless.
Like that time you got stung by a bee while waiting on deck for your swimming
relay when you were eight years old.Your mother, who also happened to be the
swim team coach, said, “</i>You’re okay,<i>” quickly made you the first
swimmer of the relay instead of the fourth, threw you onto the block, swatted
your butt when the start gun went off (your bee sting pinched and ached, still
unattended to), and said, </i>Go, Casey. Swim. Fast<i>.And you did, your right
leg full of sting the whole lap. And your relay won first place, and she was
there at the other end of the pool to pull you out, all slippery and wet as a
seal, and she tenderly pressed tobacco into your sting, which made it sting
less, and then she brought you ice for the swelling. </i>See<i>, she said. </i>You’re
okay.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>And she acted then too, at the baseball game.When
Al trotted in from the field and filed with the other players out of the
dugout, and said, </i>Hi, Mrs. Fleming. Thanks for coming<i>, she kissed
him hard on the cheek, took his hand and then took mine and said with utmost
cheer, </i>Let’s get some Frito Pie<i>.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;">
<b>** </b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b> </b>At the pep rally the next day at school, the
gymnasium roared with stu- dents. From down the hall you heard the approaching
thump of a giant drum as the band marched into the gym. Because you passed
initiation with flying colors, you sat for the first time in full uniform: the
bodice newly dry-cleaned so the sleeves popped out of the black and gold cum-
merbund a bright, pure white, your hair pulled back and held in place by a
bright gold bow, your black skirt barely covering your ass and from beneath it
your panty-hosed legs locked together in perfect position. Lipstick gathered in
the corners of your mouth.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
The first game of the season was that night. You
could feel the anticipa- tion slide off the football players’ and cheerleaders’
backs and into the sweaty air, filling your lungs too. Banners and streamers in
all shades of gold and black swung from the rafters, and a podium stood center
court, await- ing Coach Ryan’s address to the student population.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
After he spoke, you would dance the first dance of
your drill team career before the entire student body. Your stomach hollowed at
the thought of it. You tried to ignore what felt like a giant bruise between
your legs that stung each time you peed since last weekend’s initiation pool
party.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
Coach Ryan stepped up to the podium then and the
crowd hushed. The cheerleaders’ pompoms shivered against the basketball court
floor. You noticed that Coach Ryan’s gut kept him from standing too close to
the microphone.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>I’ll tell you what, </i>he said. <i>These
young men behind me are ready for a great season.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
The students cheered.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>Yes, sirree.These boys are strong as iron ore.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
Rachel giggled next to you, and poked you in the
ribs. When Coach Ryan talked in his thick Texas accent “iron ore” came out
sounding like “aaarn ore,” at least four syllables long, and it struck you both
as hilarious.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>This team is like aaarn ore, I swear to you.Ya’ll
are gonna get quite a show tonight.These boys have a lot of Po-tential. I’m
proud to work with ’em every day and ya’ll should be proud to watch ’em. Aaarn
ore, I tell you. Aaarn ore.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;">
<i>** </i><span style="text-align: left;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>Today I look through your memory box, your
scrapbooks from high school. I find three letters from your father. He started
leaving them for you the summer after you were hurt in the pool. Maybe a famous
quote, or passage from a book, sometimes just his own thoughts. He’d fold the
piece of paper in two and hang it over your steering wheel so that you’d sit in
the platinum heat of the driver’s seat and read them before heading for school
each morning. It was his way of saying things fathers have a hard time saying
to daughters, his way of educating you.The notes I found:</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
A message to Casey Fleming from her father— The
soliloquy of the Cowardly Lion from <i>The Wizard of Oz: </i>What makes a king
out of slave? Courage! What makes the flag on the mast to wave? Courage! What
makes the elephant charge his tusk In the misty mist or the dusky dusk? What
makes the muskrat guard his musk? Courage! What makes the Sphinx the Seventh
Wonder? Courage! What makes the dawn come up like thunder? Courage! What makes
the Hottentot so hot? What puts the ape in apricot? What have they got that I
ain’t got? Courage!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
Courage! Dad<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>And then another:</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
A message to Casey Fleming from her father— “I know
moon-rise, I know star-rise, I lay this body down. I walk in the moon-light; I
walk in the star-light To lay this body down.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
I walk in the graveyard, I walk through the
graveyard To lay this body down. I lie in the grave and stretch out my arms, To
lay this body down.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
—One of the 10 Master Spiritual Songs of the
African slaves in America<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
Love, Dad<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>And then another:</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
A message to Casey Fleming from her father— You’re
way cool and doing as good as you can when you’re only 16.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;">
** </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
When Coach Ryan finished his speech, Corey Locklin
led the cheerlead- ers out onto the court, and they made fists with their hands
and jumped in the air, curls bouncing everywhere. Players and students
whistled. The cheerleaders chanted: <i>We got spirit, yes we do, we got spirit,
how ’bout you.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
Then it came time for the drill team to dance. You
stood. You all marched, hands on hips, head high, in single file onto the
gymnasium floor and waited for the music to start.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
When song finally filled the gym, you danced with
all your might that day, and smiled so hard your cheeks throbbed and your jaw
ached. The stands became a giant smudge of faces. You hit every pose, every
beat, exactly right. When the song ended, and applause broke out, your heart
banged loudly against its cage and your lungs heaved in and out the dense,
spectacular air of perfection. Then you watched Mike McCormick stand up from
the hordes of players in front of you. He looked right at you, through you, then
turned his head away and blew Allison Cauldwell a kiss, and you heard her
delighted squeal in your ears for a long time afterwards.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;">
<o:p>** </o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>I find something else tucked away between ribbons
and senior photos, messages hastily scrawled from friends that say things like
“Stay sweet!” or “It was fun know- ing you.” I find a photo of you on the
football field.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>You must have just finished a performance, because
you are marching off the field in a line of girls and all of you head back into
the stands. Behind you, football play- ers and band members and cheerleaders
(there is the briefest side angle of Corey Locklin’s enormous forehead in the
crowded background) file out of the stadium too; one injured player receives
help from an assistant coach. A ripe green turf stretches beneath your feet.You
are smiling into the stands—a wide, effervescent smile that rises between your
clownishly rouged cheeks—most likely at your mother’s camera. This photo was
taken only weeks after the incident, and what strikes me most is that you are
happy, blissfully so. It takes my breath away.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>I look at you smiling up at your parents and know
that you stored up that smile especially for them. Because they prepared you to
be the kind of person who dares</i> <i>to stand on a dangerous strip of
land and dance.They prepared you to do that even without them.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>I look at the players behind you, and I cannot tell
the color of their faces, which of them will be a good man and which will not.
I look at this photo and realize it was never their faces that scared you, but
their masks.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>I look at you smiling and I remember the wind
rushing into my face, the exhil- aration of a 100-yard stage, a stadium full of
rapt observers, my nimble body, the rat- tat-tat of a drum roll. I remember
kicking my leg high into the night sky, my toes disappearing into the stars,
the persistent feeling of hope, hope, hope in each choreo- graphed step.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>I pretend it is me in the stands, and your smile is
telling me something too.That smile says, like my mother and father before it, </i>you’re
okay. I’m okay. <i>And I believe you.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">from <i>Fourth Genre</i>, Issue 9.1 Spring 2007</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment--></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-9781399281058173982013-03-11T07:56:00.001-07:002013-03-11T09:24:39.231-07:00Sermon for Southern Comfort<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
We don't own a television, my husband and I. This lack drives some of our family members bonkers and limits our social lives to the extent that we can't invite people over to watch the Oscar awards or the election results or the NCAA tournament, for example. (Note: my husband only cares about maybe one of those things, so really it only limits MY social life). I know fewer and fewer pop culture references. I don't know what to say to my students when they tell me I look like Silver from <i>90210</i>. I take it as a compliment, because whoever <a href="http://www.cwtv.com/shows/90210/cast/jessica-stroup">Silver</a> is, she's got to be a better comparison for me than Shannon Doherty. Then I think, wait, I watched <i>90210 </i>in high school. Wednesday nights. At Aileen's house. I can't be old enough to have my youth recycled yet, can I?<br />
<br />
Neither my husband or I wanted a television to become the center of our living room, the star around which the planets of our lives orbited. We hoped for more silence, more books. Silence is a precious commodity these days. Our plan only worked a little bit. We do have a quiet home and that provides us some solace. When our families visit, we do have more conversation with them than we would otherwise, perhaps. But we still watch TV, only now we watch it on our laptops, on Hulu or Netflix, and so our lives have slowly crept from the living room to the bedroom where we can catch up on the latest episode of <i>Downton Abbey</i> or <i>Project Runway</i> with our legs stretched out. <i>House of Cards</i> is our new favorite.<br />
<br />
So the real beauty of a TV-free home, for us, lies not in silence or a lack of distraction, but in the absence of too much mediocrity. If I want to watch trash now, I have to seek it out. I have to actively decide: I want to watch a Kardashian load a dishwasher for the first time in her life and sink into a cesspool of stupid. I never do this. I never do this the way I rarely stop at the bestseller shelves in the bookstore, not because there won't be a few good books there, but because I know what I want and because I know most of the beauty and truth in the world lives outside the mainstream. If I sound like a snob, I don't mean to. As Rilke reminds us, a true poet can find beauty in anything--witness Tony Hoagland's "Poor Britney Spears" or Olafur Arnald's "<a href="http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13808-found-songs/">Found Songs</a>." A writer or viewer can find richness and texture anywhere if she has the patience to sift through all the junk. Or, as David Foster Wallace reminds us:<br />
<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><i>But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.</i></span><br />
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So what's my point here? Most of us aren't David Foster Wallace or Rilke. Without primetime and regular scheduling, my husband and I are forced to think outside the box and often get surprised by something so unexpected and resplendent it restores our faith in the screen as a medium of high art. Last night, we watched a documentary called <i>Southern Comfort</i>, the story of a transgendered man and his chosen family in the last year of his life before he died of--irony of ironies--ovarian cancer. The director clearly had a small budget and a big, giant heart, as well as an eye for character and story arc. Robert Eads, the man at the center of the story, was refused cancer treatment by over 20 doctors, but died well-loved by his parents, his children, his friends, his lover, and his 3 year old grandson who only ever knew him as a man, as his Papa. His people are Southern, hard-smoking, small-town, God-fearing, his transgendered friends as good ol' boy as you can get. In a scene that shoots straight through any neat or callow binary opposition of liberal-conservative, the audience watches Robert Eads speak about coming out and loving all people while meticulously cleaning his rifle.<br />
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When Robert finally clears from the morphine haze meant to stave off his cancer pains long enough to make it to his last Southern Comfort--an annual conference in Atlanta for the transgendered community--he gives a speech asking the conference attendees to love other people like him who need a place to be who they are. Then he buys his lover, Lola, a corsage and dances all night with her. At this point in the film, I turn to look at my husband. <i>Are you crying?</i>, I ask. <i>How could I not be crying?</i>, he answers. <br />
<br />
I wish more people would see this film and films like it. More Christians. More family-oriented people. More teachers. More politicians. More watchers of television and film. But you won't see such things between 7-10pm on NBC or ABC or certainly not on Fox. <br />
<br />
<i>Why do we read?</i> I ask my students. W<i>hy do we watch TV or go to the movies? </i> They always respond with some teenage-speak version of <i>We want to be entertained </i>or<i> We want to be reassured.</i> We do--I do too--but I hope we also want to be opened up, challenged, invited into empathy as what seems "other" and apart becomes recognizable to us. There is not a decent person in the world who could have watched the story of Robert Eads and consider him godless or inhuman.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">If we are going to fill our silences with noise, let that noise be artistic (not artsy!), let that noise be story-noise. Let us, viewers, choose story over silliness, the unknowable over the knowable, the meaningful over the mundane, the provocative over the mind-numbing. Watch your <i>Housewives of Atlanta</i>--no judgment from me, I like Nene, and she is a kind of southern comfort--but don't stop there, please.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white;"><i>Amen. </i></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="background-color: white;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-31978294440188378872013-03-10T18:51:00.002-07:002013-03-10T18:51:42.583-07:00Give Me Until Tomorrow....<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
...to put up a sermon. Sorry, folks. Had a dog emergency and didn't get to edit. Mondays are good days for sermons too.<br />
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Thanks for your patience!</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-1862266594584873742013-03-03T13:16:00.000-08:002013-03-04T07:59:26.830-08:00Sermon as Triptych<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.5px;">Some weeks, the world provides you clues. This week, I experienced a triptych of elbow nudges from the world, telling me to think seriously about a few things. This trifecta took the form of a guest speaker at my school, an essay I accidentally read in <i>American Scholar</i> at my teacher's desk, and an essay from a collection given to me on my birthday by a dear friend. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.5px;"><b>I. Left Panel</b></span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">"Drape", Joseph Havel</span></td></tr>
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<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.5px;">Every year the students at my school receive the rare gift of a visiting fellow, someone who has made a name for herself, say, in the arts, sciences, or other academic field. This year, we invited <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Havel">Joseph Havel</a>, sculptor and director of the Glassel School of Art here in Houston.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.5px;">Often the fellows speak over the students' heads--not on purpose, but most 15 years olds cannot see why certain things should matter to them. Teenagers are like solar flares, burning, on fire, propelled, whose light others can see from miles away, but they have not yet learned the dimming that comes with age or distance; they have not learned to turn around; they haven't yet realized that they, themselves, are not in fact the sun but only small pieces of it. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.5px;">I also think they resisted some of Havel's lecture: given the task of answering how art relates to ethics, he told us that the artist's job is not to create meaning for the audience, no clear message for us to consume. Sending clear messages, he said, is the job of advertisers, not artists. The artists' job is not to commodify people's desires and hopes and fears, but rather to translate a moment of the physical, emotional, and mental life into form and then set it free for an audience to encounter and give meaning. That process, he said, is essentially an ethical position. Some students didn't care to imagine such an ethical position since it requires something from us as readers of art--we cannot simply consume or pay for an explanation or walk away undisturbed. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.5px;">I was rapt with attention, thinking Havel's explanation of art and ethics as a way to also understand the best impulses of religion.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.5px;">Havel then offered the students instruction on how to view art in a museum. Don't read the information card tacked next to the painting, he said, like so many visitors (Alain de Botton has a great argument for why museums should toss out informational placards altogether). Instead, let yourself experience the work of art. Then you can go back, he said, and read the information about the piece and approach it again with a critical awareness. But if you skip that first step, you miss the ethical imperative of art. You are trying to go for clear meaning and missing the encounter. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.5px;">But when I returned to my classroom, my teenagers remained unconvinced. <i>I don't want to be confused</i>, they said. <i>When I read or see something I want to understand what it means. Don't make me work. </i></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px;">My students complaints and Havel's instructions reminded me of theologian <a href="http://www.marcusjborg.com/">Marcus Borg</a>'s advise about how one should approach the Bible, a model I use to teach my students how to read other literature as well. According to Borg, religious men and women should go through three major stages:</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.5px;">1) naivete </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.5px;">2) critical thinking</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.5px;">3) post-critical naivete</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.5px;">Or, as I conceptualize it:</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.5px;">1) blind faith</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.5px;">2) critical doubt</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.5px;">3) doubtful faith</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.5px;"><b>II. Middle Panel</b></span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">"Untitled", Lee Bontecou</span></td></tr>
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<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.5px;"><i>I must clean my desk. I must clean my desk. I must clean my desk</i>, I repeated to myself Tuesday after school. I began to rashly throw old vocabulary quizzes into the recycling bin, shove pencils and pens into the far nooks of my desk drawer and straighten stacks of unexcused tardy sheets and extra handouts about dangling participles or how to visualize Shakespeare plots as Venn diagrams. Among those stacks I discovered a recent issue of <i><a href="http://theamericanscholar.org/">American Scholar</a></i>, a journal I love. I was loathe to throw it out before skimming the contents and I landed on an <a href="http://theamericanscholar.org/mortify-our-wolves/#.UTTEbI7oSeU">essay</a> by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Wiman">Christian Wiman</a>, poet and long-time editor of <i><a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/">Poetry</a> </i>magazine<i> </i>who is, as we speak, dying of bone cancer. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.5px;">I thought I'd read a few sections, but I ended up reading the whole thing in one sitting, weeping over my laptop, forgetting briefly that I needed to get home and let my dog out to pee. As if to explain Borg and Havel's theories about post-critical naivete, he wrote this:</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px; text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;"><i>It is as if joy were the default setting of human emotion, not the furtive, fugitive glimpses it becomes in lives compromised by necessity, familiarity, “maturity,” suffering. You must become as little children, Jesus said, a statement that is often used to justify anti-intellectualism and the renunciation of reason, but which I take actually to mean that we must recover this sense of wonder, this excess of spirit brimming out of the body.</i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px; text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px; text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;">And then, as if to illustrate Havel's point to the kiddos that art, which certainly the story of Jesus qualifies as, must be encountered rather than consumed, Wiman wrote this beautiful statement of faith:</span><br />
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<i><span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px; text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;">I’m a Christian not because of the resurrection (I wrestle with this), and not because I think Christianity contains more truth than other religions (I think God reveals himself, or herself, in many forms, some not religious), and not simply because it was the religion in which I was raised (this has been a high barrier). I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” (I know, I know: he was quoting the Psalms, and who quotes a poem when being tortured? The words aren’t the point. The point is that he felt human destitution to its absolute degree; the point is that God is </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;">with us, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px; text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;">not beyond us, in suffering.) I am a Christian because I understand that moment of Christ’s passion to have meaning in my own life, and what it means is that the absolutely solitary and singular nature of extreme human pain is an illusion. </span></i></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px; text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px; text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;">Wiman returned to the faith of his childhood toward the end of his young life, passing through the often adolescent or post-adolescent critical stage that so many intellectuals get stuck in, especially, I've found, young writers, more especially young male writers.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px; text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;"><b>III. Right Panel</b></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-93kQLUPFkWU/UTPBgBsKb_I/AAAAAAAABGk/-OWHtYaCT_c/s1600/KantGetty2967894_medium.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="239" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-93kQLUPFkWU/UTPBgBsKb_I/AAAAAAAABGk/-OWHtYaCT_c/s320/KantGetty2967894_medium.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Immanuel Kant</span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px; text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;">My friend gifted me <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-hass">Robert Hass</a>' new collection of essays "What Light Can Do" for my birthday last month. How well he knows me. It was the best present I got. I have only read one so far, "Study of War: Violence, Literature, and Immanuel Kant. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px; text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px; text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;">Hass attempts to break down and revive a lesser known Kant essay called "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_peace">Perpetual Peace</a>." </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px; text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;">In "Perpetual Peace", as Hass understands it, Kant acknowledged in his Kantian way that violence is the natural condition of man, and that the state of peace "is unnatural and must be struggled toward. Its nobility is its rebellion toward innocence and against the brutality of things-as-they-are." Hass then tries to explain how literature and art can serve the purpose of struggling toward peace. He imagines in his own way Joseph Havel's argument for the ethical position of art. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px; text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px; text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;">Haas remembers the term "perpetual peace" from his childhood as a Catholic, particularly from the Mass for the Dead "may the perpetual light shine upon them." He remembers that as a boy he thought the idea of perpetual peace a naive idea, an ideal only reachable with death and an undesirable ideal at that. He was in his critical thinking stage. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px; text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;">But then, he says, so many writers remind us otherwise. He calls particular attention to Czeslaw Milosz, who returned to a sometimes-tortured Catholic faith in his old age, and Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau stood firmly in the last stage of faith and art: post-critical naivete. An idea expressed in his poem "<a href="http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15529">The Lake Isle of Innisfree</a>," according to Hass, is that the concept of perpetual peace or heaven, "is deficient as a description of a realizable place on earth, but is not deficient as a description of a place held close the heart." </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px; text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px; text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;">Art scoots us right up against that place held close to our hearts, that place we believe in the way children believe, even if we can't get in from here. All three artists, Joseph Havel, Christian Wiman, and Robert Hass implore us to use wonder and thought to navigate art, to use the heart and mind to allow the world "to stream through you rather than reaching out to always take a hold of it." </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px; text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;">Have doubt, they say, and have faith.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px; text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 22.5px; text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;">All three men urge against the question, "But what does it mean?" </span><br />
<br />
<div style="text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;">
<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.5px;">That our priests and pastors may be artists and may be so wise and so bold as to ask their audiences to approach with wonder the Story and leave the easy, definitive answers to such a childish question to the advertisers. </span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;">
<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.5px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: 1.649999976158142px;">
<span style="color: #0c0c0c; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.5px;"><i>Amen.</i></span></span></div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-52225201311499163752013-02-28T08:52:00.002-08:002013-02-28T08:52:58.315-08:00Other Voices<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Here's a little interim reading between sermons, an op-ed from the <i>New York Times</i> today, by Hans Kung. Amen, I say. <i>Amen.</i><br />
<br />
Link:<br />
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/28/opinion/a-vatican-spring.html?hp"></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/28/opinion/a-vatican-spring.html?hp">A Vatican Spring? by Hans Kung</a><br />
<br />
Full text: <br />
<br />
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THE Arab Spring has shaken a whole series of autocratic regimes. With the resignation of <a class="meta-per" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/benedict_xvi/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Benedict XVI.">Pope Benedict XVI</a>, might not something like that be possible in the <a class="meta-org" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/roman_catholic_church/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about the Roman Catholic Church.">Roman Catholic Church</a> as well — a Vatican Spring? </div>
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<br /></div>
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Of course, the system of the Catholic Church doesn’t resemble Tunisia or
Egypt so much as an absolute monarchy like Saudi Arabia. In both places
there are no genuine reforms, just minor concessions. In both,
tradition is invoked to oppose reform. In Saudi Arabia tradition goes
back only two centuries; in the case of the papacy, 20 centuries. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Yet is that tradition true? In fact, the church got along for a
millennium without a monarchist-absolutist papacy of the kind we’re
familiar with today. </div>
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<br /></div>
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It was not until the 11th century that a “revolution from above,” the
“Gregorian Reform” started by Pope Gregory VII, left us with the three
enduring features of the Roman system: a centralist-absolutist papacy,
compulsory clericalism and the obligation of celibacy for priests and
other secular clergy. </div>
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<br /></div>
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The efforts of the reform councils in the 15th century, the reformers in
the 16th century, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in the
17th and 18th centuries and the liberalism of the 19th century met with
only partial success. Even the Second Vatican Council, from 1962 to
1965, while addressing many concerns of the reformers and modern
critics, was thwarted by the power of the Curia, the church’s governing
body, and managed to implement only some of the demanded changes. </div>
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<br /></div>
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To this day the Curia, which in its current form is likewise a product
of the 11th century, is the chief obstacle to any thorough reform of the
Catholic Church, to any honest ecumenical understanding with the other
Christian churches and world religions, and to any critical,
constructive attitude toward the modern world. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Under the two most recent popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, there
has been a fatal return to the church’s old monarchical habits. </div>
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<br /></div>
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In 2005, in one of Benedict’s few bold actions, he held an amicable
four-hour conversation with me at his summer residence in Castel
Gandolfo in Rome. I had been his colleague at the University of Tübingen
and also his harshest critic. For 22 years, thanks to the revocation of
my ecclesiastical teaching license for having criticized papal
infallibility, we hadn’t had the slightest private contact. </div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
Before the meeting, we decided to set aside our differences and discuss
topics on which we might find agreement: the positive relationship
between Christian faith and science, the dialogue among religions and
civilizations, and the ethical consensus across faiths and ideologies. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
For me, and indeed for the whole Catholic world, the meeting was a sign
of hope. But sadly Benedict’s pontificate was marked by breakdowns and
bad decisions. He irritated the Protestant churches, Jews, Muslims, the
Indians of Latin America, women, reform-minded theologians and all
pro-reform Catholics. </div>
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<br /></div>
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The major scandals during his papacy are known: there was Benedict’s
recognition of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s arch-conservative Society of
St. Pius X, which is bitterly opposed to the Second Vatican Council, as
well as of a Holocaust denier, Bishop Richard Williamson. </div>
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<br /></div>
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There was the widespread sexual abuse of children and youths by
clergymen, which the pope was largely responsible for covering up when
he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. And there was the “Vatileaks” affair,
which revealed a horrendous amount of intrigue, power struggles,
corruption and sexual lapses in the Curia, and which seems to be a main
reason Benedict has decided to resign. </div>
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This first papal resignation in nearly 600 years makes clear the
fundamental crisis that has long been looming over a coldly ossified
church. And now the whole world is asking: might the next pope, despite
everything, inaugurate a new spring for the Catholic Church? </div>
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<br /></div>
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There’s no way to ignore the church’s desperate needs. There is a
catastrophic shortage of priests, in Europe and in Latin America and
Africa. Huge numbers of people have left the church or gone into
“internal emigration,” especially in the industrialized countries. There
has been an unmistakable loss of respect for bishops and priests,
alienation, particularly on the part of younger women, and a failure to
integrate young people into the church. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
One shouldn’t be misled by the media hype of grandly staged papal mass
events or by the wild applause of conservative Catholic youth groups.
Behind the facade, the whole house is crumbling. </div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
In this dramatic situation the church needs a pope who’s not living
intellectually in the Middle Ages, who doesn’t champion any kind of
medieval theology, liturgy or church constitution. It needs a pope who
is open to the concerns of the Reformation, to modernity. A pope who
stands up for the freedom of the church in the world not just by giving
sermons but by fighting with words and deeds for freedom and human
rights within the church, for theologians, for women, for all Catholics
who want to speak the truth openly. A pope who no longer forces the
bishops to toe a reactionary party line, who puts into practice an
appropriate democracy in the church, one shaped on the model of
primitive Christianity. A pope who doesn’t let himself be influenced by a
Vatican-based “shadow pope” like Benedict and his loyal followers. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
Where the new pope comes from should not play a crucial role. The
College of Cardinals must simply elect the best man. Unfortunately,
since the time of Pope John Paul II, a questionnaire has been used to
make all bishops follow official Roman Catholic doctrine on
controversial issues, a process sealed by a vow of unconditional
obedience to the pope. That’s why there have so far been no public
dissenters among the bishops. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Yet the Catholic hierarchy has been warned of the gap between itself and
lay people on important reform questions. A recent poll in Germany
shows 85 percent of Catholics in favor of letting priests marry, 79
percent in favor of letting divorced persons remarry in church and 75
percent in favor of ordaining women. Similar figures would most likely
turn up in many other countries. </div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
Might we get a cardinal or bishop who doesn’t simply want to continue in
the same old rut? Someone who, first, knows how deep the church’s
crisis goes and, second, knows paths that lead out of it? </div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
These questions must be openly discussed before and during the conclave,
without the cardinals being muzzled, as they were at the last conclave,
in 2005, to keep them in line. </div>
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<br /></div>
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As the last active theologian to have participated in the Second Vatican
Council (along with Benedict), I wonder whether there might not be, at
the beginning of the conclave, as there was at the beginning of the
council, a group of brave cardinals who could tackle the Roman Catholic
hard-liners head-on and demand a candidate who is ready to venture in
new directions. Might this be brought about by a new reforming council
or, better yet, a representative assembly of bishops, priests and lay
people? </div>
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<br /></div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
If the next conclave were to elect a pope who goes down the same old
road, the church will never experience a new spring, but fall into a new
ice age and run the danger of shrinking into an increasingly irrelevant
sect. </div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="authorIdentification">
<i><a href="http://www.weltethos.org/data-en/c-10-stiftung/10a-definition.php" title="Global Ethic Center">Hans Küng</a>
is a professor emeritus of ecumenical theology at the University of
Tübingen and the author of the forthcoming book “Can the Church Still Be
Saved?” This essay was translated by Peter Heinegg from the German. </i><br />
</div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-36619137683244289592013-02-24T08:26:00.000-08:002013-02-24T08:36:08.151-08:00Sermon Against Memes and Guns<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
All this talk about guns is getting to me.<br />
<br />
We've all, I'm sure, been bombarded in our news feeds and Twitter worlds with memes that hastily point out the bad logic of NRA reps or the naivete of liberals. I got this one in my news feed this morning:<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qLg4cvoyazg/USorwrxL2rI/AAAAAAAABFg/fvOqb2SlMBQ/s1600/photo.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qLg4cvoyazg/USorwrxL2rI/AAAAAAAABFg/fvOqb2SlMBQ/s320/photo.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
The meme is a response to a comment made by a Colorado Representative, Democrat Joe Salazar, about recent gun control measures passed in his state that include a law making college campuses gun-free zones. He argued that the possibility of rape should not justify a woman's right to carry a handgun in her purse. He added, "It's why we have call boxes; it's why we have safe zones; it's why we have whistles."<br />
<br />
I guess the creator of the meme is making an argument that whistles don't prevent rape as well as guns. It's an argument about as emotionally mature as an <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqQn2ADZE1A">Aerosmith song</a>. Still, I found myself unable to ignore it or <i>tsk-tsk</i> my way out of thinking about the implications of such a meme and people's willingness to pass it around as a solid argument.<br />
<br />
Let me use a real rhetorical device here (as opposed to a meme) and appeal to my own authority.<br />
<br />
I am a woman. <br />
<br />
I am not naive.<br />
<br />
I am a woman who feels endangered. I am a survivor of sexual assault. If I go through a list in my head of my 10 closest female friends, at least 6 of them have survived rape or sexual abuse, in some cases severe abuse. Those numbers match up with <a href="http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/frequency-of-sexual-assault">national statistics</a>.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
I am a woman who also feels rage more often that I care to admit. Last week I even had a dream that I shot someone. A pregnant woman. In her stomach. When I woke up I didn't feel guilty or horrified. I felt relieved. Then I went about my day, a day that included me writing a joyful letter to a pregnant friend expressing my sincere, genuine happiness about her new baby.<br />
<br />
I am a woman who understands the all-too-human instinct toward violence, revenge, anger. My psyche is capable of violence too. <br />
<br />
I am a woman who knows the difference between dreams and reality.<br />
<br />
I do not want to carry a gun in my purse. I do not want guns anywhere near my home, my school, my family, or my person.<br />
<br />
Let me say that again: I do not want to carry a gun in my purse. Or mace. Or a whistle. <br />
<br />
I want to live in a world where women are safe. <br />
<br />
I want to live in a world where my option isn't whistle or gun, victim or perpetrator, passive resistor or co-conspirator to a culture that accepts violence as its <i>modus operandi</i>. <br />
<br />
I want to live in a world where people have the intelligence to recognize that rape and gun violence stem from the same sickness, and that arming women against male violence doesn't solve male violence so much as quietly assent to its existence. <br />
<br />
I don't want to see your stupid memes, because they are violent too. Memes are a huge part of the problem here. Don't get me wrong, I like the occasional purely humorous meme, those aimed at nobody. But politicized memes are a bastardized form of rhetoric and logic, only persuasive in the basest sense, and they lend themselves to all kinds of fallacious reasoning. Politics or activism on the cheap, memes oversimplify and are the psychosocial equivalent of poking someone in the ribs again and again and again or flexing ones own muscles in the mirror. Posting a meme onto your Facebook page is a passive, pathetic attempt at real dialogue, a convenient way to avoid dealing with complexity and gray area, a great way to feel safe inside your own smugness. Never mind other people's safety. <br />
<br />
I want to live in a world where we arm women and men with the weapons of love, gentleness, and respect. <br />
<br />
As Galatians 5:22 reminds us, " The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law."<br />
<br />
Or, wait. Let me get a woman here. Bell Hooks says it best:<br />
<blockquote style="background-color: #fefdfa; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
"It is not easy for males, young or old, to reject the codes of patriarchal masculinity. Men who choose against violence are simultaneously choosing against patriarchy, wherther they can articulate that choice or not....</blockquote>
<blockquote style="background-color: #fefdfa; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
Ultimately, the men who choose agaisnt violence, against death, do so because they want to live fully and well, because they want to know love. These men who are true heroes."</blockquote>
<i>Amen. </i></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-8342087497928582032013-02-17T16:09:00.000-08:002013-02-17T16:09:30.839-08:00Sermon for Soulful Places<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Yesterday I did something strange. I attended the 50th Anniversary celebration for the middle school I attended between the years of 1988-1991. Big things happened in those years: the Berlin Wall fell, Spike Lee released "Do the Right Thing", our soldiers fought in the First Gulf War. I have specific memories of these events--very specific, actually: my father transfixed by the television screen, saying to me, "I didn't think I'd see this happen. Sis, the Cold War. It's over," and later on that same old boob tube the apocalyptic fuzziness of bombs and tanks in night raids, our first televised war. But these paled in comparison to the big things happening in my personal life. After all, I was pubescent, hormonal, and still very, very sweet. I <i>felt </i>everything a lot.<br />
<br />
Most people hated middle school. Not me, despite some real sorrows and struggles. I went to a special school with special children. What do I mean by special?<br />
<br />
The philosophy that guided and still guides my middle school, a public school, is the belief that a common space shared between "gifted and talented" kids culled from a diverse spectrum of Houston neighborhoods and kids who suffer various physical and mental impairments will produce wholehearted young adults. Perhaps the creators of the school thought <i>if we get them at their most impressionable.... </i>I don't know. I do know my brother can still perform "We Are the World" in sign language, for whatever that's worth.<br />
<br />
Yesterday, as I gushed about writing to my 8th grade English teacher, Mrs. Duhon, who I'd bet good money had no idea who I was, watched as current students sang and signed the school's fight song, nodded at the teenage brother rolling his sister's wheelchair up the ramp to the cafeteria where I once kissed a boy, and later as I walked through the upstairs of the school with my brother, my future sister-in-law, and an old friend from 7th grade, each of us reeling from a tidal wave of exhumed memories and images, the same word rose up like a whisper into my consciousness again and again.<br />
<br />
<i>Soulful.</i> This is a soulful place, I thought.<br />
<br />
My father often speaks of what he calls "Catholic" places. He does not mean churches. The Catholic Church, to my unending despair, has not lived up lately to its name in the way he means. He means to refer to a kind of spirituality, yes, but he refers also to the original definition of the word catholic: universal, all-embracing. Soulful. <br />
<br />
The soul is made up of light and dark, messy at its core. Soulful people and soulful places welcome shadows and sun. They smile, open wide their arms or doors and say "Come as you are," as in the words of the old hymn, <i>Come all ye who are weary, come home.</i> They do not thrive on perfection or strive toward mere prosperity. Soulful places are common places with real people, purpose made flesh, therefore, poetic, therefore, holy. Even in the secular world, these places honor the Jewish concept of <i><a href="http://www.pjlibrary.org/Parents-and-Families/Reading-Tips-and-Resources/Jewish-Values/Hachnasat-Orchim.aspx">Hachnasat Orchim</a></i>, the virtue of welcoming the stranger, an idea extended by Jesus to include not only the stranger but the strange--the outcast, the lowly, the downtrodden.<br />
<br />
In my life, I name these places as soulful: <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Antidote-Coffee/34851558346">Antidote Coffee Shop</a>, Alabama Ice House, <a href="http://www.christchurchcathedral.org/">Christ Church Cathedral</a>, <a href="http://cjd.org/">Casa Juan Diego</a>, <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/cozy-corner-houston">The Cozy Corner</a>, <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/cozy-corner-houston">The Silver Slipper</a>, any well-run YMCA, the Greyhound Station, and the <a href="http://www.houstonisd.org/rogersms">T.H. Rogers School</a>, among others.<br />
<br />
We were messy little things, me and my middle school companions. Still are, many of us. Many of us have crossed paths as adults, and in each of these encounters, I find myself reminded how wounded even the "gifted" can be, how vulnerable, how strange, how luminous. How lucky we were, strange creatures, to have our own soulful spot inside the chaotic universe of adolescence. <br />
<br />
<i>Amen. </i><br />
<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-9358677586959543312013-02-01T06:07:00.004-08:002013-02-01T06:08:15.273-08:00Inter-Sermon Poem: Reading for Any Sad Day<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">As If There Were Only One</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">_________________________________________________ </span></span><br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">In the morning God pulled
me onto the porch,<br />
a rain-washed gray and brilliant shore.<br />
<br />
I sat in my orange pajamas and waited.<br />
God said, “Look at the tree.” And I did.<br />
<br />
Its leaves were newly yellow and green,<br />
slick and bright, and so alive it hurt<br />
<br />
to take the colors in. My pupils grew<br />
hungry and wide against my will.<br />
<br />
God said, “Listen to the tree.”<br />
And I did. It said, “Live!”<br />
<br />
And it opened itself wider, not with desire,<br />
but the way I imagine a surgeon spreads <br />
<br />
the ribs of a patient in distress and rubs<br />
her paralyzed heart, only this tree parted<br />
<br />
its own limbs toward the sky—I was the light in that sky.<br />
I reached in to the thick, sweet core<br />
<br />
and I lifted it to my mouth and held it there<br />
for a long time until I tasted the word<br />
<br />
<i>tree</i> (because I had forgotten its name).<br />
Then I said my own name twice softly.<br />
<br />
Augustine said, <i>God loves each of us as if <br />
there were only one of us</i>, but I hadn’t believed him.<br />
<br />
And God put me down on the steps with my coffee<br />
and my cigarettes. And, although I still <br />
<br />
could not eat nor sleep, that evening <br />
and that morning were my first day back. </span></blockquote>
-Martha Serpas<br />
<br />
<i>Amen. </i></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-15336507183093965842013-01-27T10:28:00.003-08:002013-01-27T11:41:51.960-08:00Sermon on Reciprocal Inhibition<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
So often our bodies are the best teachers. <br />
<br />
For the past three weeks, I've endured the moans and groans of teenagers who expected to lay around chanting when they signed up for my yoga class. They staged pouty mutinies every time I asked them to perform a leg lift or plank. And then, because they're lovely creatures, they stepped up to each challenge, albeit with giggles and sighs.<br />
<br />
I wasn't trying to torture them or play the tough coach. On the contrary, I care about their young bodies, already so beaten and bruised by 15 pound backpacks and hours spent in front of screens and windows: iPhones, computers, televisions, windshields, and blackboards. I also teach over-achieving, and therefore, high-anxiety kiddos. Plus, they're teenagers and body conscious as a rule. The last thing they feel comfortable wearing is their own skin. Getting them to just close their eyes and breath deeply requires me to have the patience of Job. <br />
<br />
<i>What poses do you want to do today?</i> I'd ask.<br />
<br />
The inevitable chorus of voices: <i>Savasana</i>!!! (for those of you not familiar with yoga, that's the pose where you lay on the ground and do nothing)<br />
<br />
But in my <a href="http://www.bybyoga.com/">yoga teacher training</a>, one of the first things I learned was the concept of reciprocal inhibition. Reciprocal inhibition describes the relaxation of muscles to accommodate the contraction of opposing muscles. Our bodies understand this yin and yang already, but we can help them along as well. For example, if you want to get your tight hamstrings to loosen up, you don't stretch them as common knowledge would say. Instead, you strengthen and contract the opposing muscles--your quadriceps--and your motor neurons will send some quick text messages to your hamstrings telling them to CFD (Calm the F-ck Down). Flexibility requires strength. Strength requires flexibility. <br />
<br />
So before I sent them into <i>savasana</i>, I asked my students to fatigue their muscles in various ways. And it worked: tighter muscles began to ease open their rusty gates. <br />
<br />
In anatomy the flexed muscle is referred to as the <i>agonist</i>, and the "opposing muscle" is referred to as the <i>antagonist</i>, which pleases me to no end as a writer and teacher of English. The antagonist. The adversary. The foe. The nemesis. My impossibly wound muscle fibers have a face--The Joker, the orc, the mean girl. <br />
<br />
There's a bigger wisdom here past the warrior and pigeon poses, a lesson literature teaches as well. Our bodies instruct us: if we want to have more flexibility in our own views, we must strengthen our understanding of the opposing views. Likewise, if we want our opponents to relax their positions, we will need to strengthen our own arguments. <br />
<br />
The concept of reciprocal inhibition might serve us in so many important ways off the yoga mat.<br />
<br />
If I want my students to experience more ease with vocabulary or grammar, maybe I need to strengthen my expectations and lessons.<br />
<br />
If I want to have a calm and relaxed space in my life to write more, maybe I need to tighten my discipline at other tasks that require time from me, become firmer in saying no to requests for my time by other people. <br />
<br />
If I want my husband to speak his feelings to me more freely, maybe I might contract my own voice a little.<br />
<br />
If I want my friends to confide in me, maybe I should build up my listening skills. <br />
<br />
If I want to stop thinking about my ex-boyfriend, maybe I should find a hobby and dedicate myself to it.<br />
<br />
If I want to stop hating that pretty, popular girl in the front row in my Algebra class, maybe I should hang out with her. Or, as Abraham Lincoln once said, "I don't like that man. I must get to know him better."<br />
<br />
If I want my child to stop throwing fits, maybe I should become more grounded and dependable.<br />
<br />
If I want Congress to pass my proposed bill, maybe--<i>ahem, Mr. President</i>--I should not compromise it so much as firm up its merits.<br />
<br />
And as all of us tighten up, maybe we will lose our inhibitions, release our grip on our antagonists, all those small and big enemies we face down everyday. Maybe we can breath easy and let them go, confident in our strength, and set ourselves free in the process.<br />
<br />
The light in me recognizes and honors the light in all of you.<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Amen.</i><br />
<br />
<br /></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-43783936082054408392013-01-20T10:52:00.000-08:002013-01-20T10:55:16.829-08:00Sermon on the Eve of Inauguration<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Last semester, a group of 15 year olds sat around a seminar table and talked to me about their reactions to Peter Singer's "<a href="http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/singermag1.html">The Singer Solution to World Poverty</a>," a summary of his utilitarian philosophy about sharing the wealth. His basic thesis: no one needs more than $30,000 a year to live on; everything else should go to other people in the form of charity. This seminar discussion is without fail always one of my most heated and impassioned every fall semester. <br />
<br />
One girl, visibly upset, turned to me and said, "I mean, I think he's right, I guess. I feel bad. But he's so rude about it. And I mean, what am I supposed to do to help?"<br />
<br />
She felt moved but defensive, the way many people feel when they have their privilege pointed out to them by another person.<br />
<br />
For those of you readers who do not already know or suspect, I teach at a prestigious college preparatory school. Or, as so many of my friends say when I tell them where I teach, "Oh, the rich kids."<br />
<br />
They raise an eyebrow into a tight check mark on their brow that translates as one of two things: <i>good luck with those brats</i> or <i>you're not a REAL teacher, out of the trenches like that</i>.<br />
<br />
Both conclusions bother me. Sure, I have some guilt about my luck given other schools I've taught in with needier, more damaged kids. I often repeat the story of my first teaching job at 22 years old. I lasted only one semester--it wasn't the parole officers or 14 year old girls with their own babies that got me in the end, but the young student who had a dead cockroach stuck in his ear that, as he told me, "The doctor won't get out, cuz we don't got insurance." His English teacher--a 23 year old Teach for America volunteer--and I used our off periods to find a free clinic that would remove the cockroach from his infected ear. I was completely unprepared for that job. I was under the impression the students needed me to teach them Spanish. They didn't. They needed a case worker. It took me 11 years to return to teaching at the high school level. <br />
<br />
My husband and I often worry whether our talents might be better spent in other places. I have my days: I walk through the hallways aghast at casual conversations between teenagers that include throwaway comments about cruises through the Greek isles, $4,000 jeans, and box seats at Texans games with such-and-such CEOs or so-and-so politicians. <br />
<br />
The longer I teach these "rich kids", though, the more I realize the universe put me exactly where it needed me. Turns out it's easier to feel empathy for disadvantaged kids that it is to feel empathy for privileged kids. But they need our empathy. And this country needs us to have empathy for them. <br />
<br />
Bear with me a second.<br />
<br />
The first term of Obama's presidency saw Occupation Wall Street, a movement that didn't even reach the outer edges of my students' little radars. Obama's biggest cage match wasn't against bin Laden or any other foreign enemy. The championship fight went to John Boehner and company. The fight is about class, and the we're still in the late rounds--no one has TKO'ed yet. The major obstacles to bipartisanship in our country right now are obstacles of privilege: male privilege and economic privilege.<br />
<br />
Privilege is tricky--people who have it often can't see it. Some never see it. That's one of the basic postcolonial arguments: those on the margins have a wider lens than those in the center of power. My students didn't ask to be born wealthy any more than a poor child asks to be born into destitution. They didn't have a choice, and most don't have any real grasp on just how high they sit on the economic totem pole. But so often when they're confronted with the reality of their privilege they feel shamed for something they didn't do and can't yet control. And those that have managed to grasp their socioeconomic position often feel enormous amounts of pressure to live up to their parents' standards of wealth and status.<br />
<br />
As a class, we tried to work out why Peter Singer's article bothered my students so much. We finally agreed it was a matter of tone (they weren't quite ready to talk about the possible limitations of utilitarian philosophy in general). I used this realization on their part as a teaching moment. The art of persuasion, I told them, is not only about appeals--ethos, pathos, logos--but about the <b><i>tone</i></b> that dresses those appeals, an awareness of audience and situation. Singer, for all his intelligence, was tone deaf in that article if he meant to persuade rich people. He shamed them and they reacted they way all of us react to shame. "Shame," as Brene Brown tells us, "corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change." When shamed, people resist change and dig in their heels. They start to feel like people are out to get them, a fear I've seen in many rich people, one that makes even the most well-intentioned of them behave badly. Witness a large part of the leadership of the Republican Party. If we want privileged people--especially young people--to change, we better move away from shame and toward empowerment, away from bitterness and toward love.<br />
<br />
Don't get me wrong: it's horribly unfair that we must ask the world's disadvantaged people to resist anger and try empathy instead, to take the moral high ground. Just. Not. Fair. Also, there is a time and a place for anger. <br />
<br />
Still, most of my students, those "rich kids", are kind-hearted human beings. They need mentors to help them look privilege square in the eye, recognize it, and then do something useful with it. To this end, I have great admiration for a nonprofit called <a href="http://www.resourcegeneration.org/">Resource Generation</a> that aims to empower wealthy young adults to leverage their assets and create social change. <br />
<br />
The best feminists have figured out that to transform our ideas about gender, we will need to empower men as much as women. The same follows for economic injustice. We will need to empower rich people as well as poor people if we want lasting change, and that empowerment requires us to check our tone. <br />
<br />
I want to pull that student aside and tell her she doesn't have to feel shame about her wealth. I want to tell her: you're beautiful, talented, intelligent, very, very lucky, and you have so much worth that isn't born of and goes way beyond your pocketbook, because if I tell her that maybe--just maybe--she'll see worth in other people too and she won't begin to hoard her wealth, cast suspicious glances in all directions, because she believes without money she is nothing.<br />
<br />
And in honor of the holiday and inauguration tomorrow, I want to offer a rationale for why I've come to accept and even love my job in that school of rich kids. In the words of the tonally-gifted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>That's it. There is a power in love that our world has not discovered yet. Jesus discovered it centuries ago. Mahatma Gandhi of India discovered it a few years ago, but most men and most women never discover it...</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>And oh this morning, as I think of the fact that our world is in transition now. Our whole world is facing a revolution. Our nation is facing a revolution, our nation. One of the things that concerns me most is that in the midst of the revolution of the world and the midst of the revolution of this nation, that we will discover the meaning of Jesus' words...</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<br />
<div>
<i>As we look out across the years and across the generations, let us develop and move right here. We must discover the power of love, the power, the redemptive power of love. And when we discover that we will be able to make of this old world a new world. We will be able to make men better.</i></div>
<br />
<br />
Amen.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-56653961658279307232013-01-14T16:04:00.002-08:002013-01-14T16:13:54.327-08:00Sermon for Hope <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I'm so <i>not</i> with child. So <i>not</i> knocked up. So do <i>not</i> have a bun in the oven. Etc.<br />
<br />
But I am pregnant. <br />
<br />
The word pregnant has several meanings aside from the most commonly used. Pregnant also means <i>expectant</i>, <i>fraught</i>, <i>weighty</i>, <i>creative</i>. <br />
<br />
I am <i>expectant</i> in the sense that I expect to get pregnant even though I have not yet. <br />
<br />
My days are <i>fraught</i> with expectation and desire. <br />
<br />
My fraught expectations are <i>weighty</i> too. I carry them like one might carry a baby. They are sometimes hard to carry through a day, an hour, the three minutes required of the little pee stick. I often think of what writer Pablo Neruda said at fellow poet, Cesar Vallejo's funeral: <i>For him, carrying a day was like carrying a mountain, </i>and Vallejo, presumably, never endured the two week wait.<br />
<br />
And I am <i>creative</i>. I create all the time. I create expectations for myself that are fraught with desire and weigh too much. I create symptoms too. I implant my creations into soft beds and will them to grow.<br />
<br />
So, ironically, some days I'd like to be less pregnant, less filled to the brim with want. <br />
<br />
The Dalai Lama tells us that having few desires is vital for contentment, but that we must desire in order to live. Translation: be a little bit pregnant.<br />
<br />
Romans 12:12 tells us to "Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer." Translation: Be very pregnant, but be pregnant with hope.<br />
<br />
I am not the only one among us who finds it difficult at times to remain pregnant--not with desire--but with hope when the world is so consistently unfair. I am thinking in particular of Claudia Rankine here, this lyric from <i>Don't Let Me Be Lonely</i>:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zRLX0e8ALYM/UPSaJdHOrKI/AAAAAAAABEY/qrSheE_cHAk/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-01-14+at+5.51.44+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="126" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zRLX0e8ALYM/UPSaJdHOrKI/AAAAAAAABEY/qrSheE_cHAk/s400/Screen+Shot+2013-01-14+at+5.51.44+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
Too many of us fill ourselves up with expectation, desire, and blind optimism instead of hope. Hope is hard. Hope is hard because hope, born of the soul, is different from desire or blind optimism, hope as the great poet Czelaw Milosz wrote "is when you believe the earth is not a dream, but living flesh."<br />
<br />
May we all be pregnant, even those of us suffering from desire in the face of difficulty.<br />
<br />
May we all be heavy, heavy with hope.<br />
<br />
<i>Amen.</i><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-54148755899384897922013-01-06T07:35:00.003-08:002013-01-06T07:36:33.691-08:00Sermon on Restorative Justice (with Guest Preacher)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
When I wrote about Sandy Hook elementary school a few weeks ago, I received more hits on that post than all the other posts I've published combined. I know I can attribute the high visitation stats for my blog, in part, to the borderline sick obsession with social media we all have in the wake of "big news." Sensationalism, if you will--not of the act itself, which was so unimaginable it could hardly be sensationalized, but of everything happening before and after the fact of the shooting, everything we projected onto those sweet victims and that one perpetrator.<br />
<br />
Even still, for me thinking about and writing that post got me into my personal obsession with what I referred to in that post as "the myth of redemptive violence" as opposed to the Jesus myth and other myths from other cultures that speak to us instead of a radical redemptive love. <br />
<br />
My husband and I tried to pick out a movie to go see the other night from a list that included Tarantino's latest, <i>Django Unchained</i>, and the Jack Reacher movie (which my dad told me had a body count of 11). I've never been a Tarantino fan, which makes me a leper in my group of writer friends. I walked out of the first installation of <i>Kill Bill</i> after Uma Thurman's character murdered a woman in front of her young daughter. I'm not conservative or prude and I appreciate aesthetics, story line, and Tarantino's regular breaking down of stereotypes. <br />
<br />
But I've had it with violence as entertainment or aesthetic medium. I've just had it. It's the same reason I despise myself every time I can't pry myself away from an episode of <i>Game of Thrones</i> and why I don't sleep well afterwards either. It's the same reason I felt horror when my college students, huge Tarantino fans, submitted a complaint to the university that I made them watch a documentary that showed violence against indigenous people in South America. Aestheticized violence, fine, but real life, no way they could handle that. The popular story line of violence as revenge and redemption, custom made with a an audience primed to be in zealous support of the hero or heroine--it makes me worry that we're really spiritually ill, and I wish we'd tell healthier stories, even ones that include violence since violence, of course, exists in the world as a real character.<br />
<br />
At any rate, I wanted to write about all this and more and then, as providence would have it, my dear friend and reader posted a link to an article by Paul Tullis from last week's <i>New York Times Magazine </i>and I realized it WAS the sermon I wanted to write. <br />
<br />
Here it is.<br />
<br />
Read it. <br />
<br />
Think about it. <br />
<br />
How radical, how radiant, how cutting edge.<br />
<br />
<i>Amen.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/magazine/can-forgiveness-play-a-role-in-criminal-justice.html?smid=pl-share">Can Forgiveness Play a Role in Criminal Justice?</a><br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="nyt_headline" id="nyt_headline" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; padding-bottom: 3px;">
Can Forgiveness Play a Role in Criminal Justice?</div>
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<div class="timestamp" id="pubdate" style="background-color: white; color: grey; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">
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<div class="story" id="summary" style="background-color: white; clear: left; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15px; padding: 2px 0px 30px;">
After 19-year-old Conor McBride killed his girlfriend, her devastated parents tried a process called “restorative justice” — because they decided his life was worth saving....</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415967006803093743.post-2818353291550255942012-12-30T19:03:00.004-08:002012-12-30T19:09:12.638-08:00Christmas Sermon with Plumeria<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
On the island of Kauai, near the town of Kapa'a, at the head of Opaekaa Falls, lives an 86 year old man named Fred. <br />
<br />
If a visiting couple--on their honeymoon, say--were to pass by on a cloudy Christmas day and happen to catch Fred in his yard, he might call out to them. <br />
<br />
He might say, "Hey! Are you visiting us?"<br />
<br />
"Yes," they might call back and stop, mid-stride, relieved for the break from a non-committal jog they embarked on mostly out of a rain-induced malaise and holiday nostalgia. <br />
<br />
Fred might wave them over, and they might watch him cross his yard, bend with a surprising amount of dexterity toward the freshly mown grass, and pick up a perfectly five-pointed, pink plumeria, yellow pooling from its core.<br />
<br />
"Here," he might say to them and hold his hand out. "This one is pretty. And this one too."<br />
<br />
He might lean over then to inspect another flower.<br />
<br />
"Thank you," one of the honeymooners will say, the bride probably, and hold the pink plumeria up to her sweaty ear.<br />
<br />
"People use them to make leis," Fred will say. Despite his spryness, Fred might not notice that he has stopped the couple in the middle of a workout. That, or he thinks workouts less serious business than plumerias.<br />
<br />
"You have nice teeth," he might say to her then, suddenly, causing her first real laugh of the day. "Take care of them," he says.<br />
<br />
He will tell the couple about crossing the continental mainland of America five times in his youth. He'll make them guess his age. <i>Seventy</i>, they might say to flatter him, but they will still feel shock when he says <i>no, eighty-six</i>, and shows a whole set of teeth with his grin.<br />
<br />
One of the honeymooners will finally explain that they have no way to carry the two plumerias, because they're headed two more miles down to the sea.<br />
<br />
"You're going ALL the way down?" he might gasp. "Oh, to be young again."<br />
<br />
"Listen," he'll say. "I'm going to place these flowers in a paper bag and put that bag right there between the mail boxes, so you can pick them up on your way back."<br />
<br />
On their way back up the mountain and into the inland jungle of Wailua, the couple might cross the street from left to right, noticing the <i>Danger </i>signs that mark the ledge near the waterfall. They will feel curious and skeptical about the bag of flowers. <br />
<br />
But there it is. A brown paper bag between two mail boxes, folded pristinely at the top into two hems. <br />
<br />
They might open the bag them, expected one pink plumeria and a slightly wilted white plumeria. Instead, they might find twenty flowers--red, pink, white, and yellow--stuffed to the brim of that bag.<br />
<br />
In their rental cottage far removed from seaside resorts and condos, they'll steep the flowers in a small glass bowl filled with water and set the bowl, blooming, by their bed.<br />
<br />
In her sleep, the bride will dream she has grown old. In her dream, she will wear a long dress that billows at her feet. At her feet, a yard sewn from soft petals. She might wake late that Christmas noel to remember the story of Bethlehem: the manger, the inns with no more vacancies. The simplicity of the divine and our call to welcome the stranger. <br />
<br />
She might think, <i>of course</i>, this is the best any of us can do, especially in the second halves of our lives. Her Christmas gift, a lesson that says: Let us gather the flowers from our yards before they wither and brown, let us offer them in plump bundles to strangers, passersby and young people, that they might wear the flowers like tiny sunbursts in their hair as they walk to the shores and stare out over the wide horizons of their new lives. </div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3