[This week, The Seedbed is proud to participate in a blog tour of Jennifer Woodruff Tait's newly-published book, The Poisoned Chalice: Eucharistic Grape Juice and Common Sense Realism in Victorian Methodism (University of Alabama Press). Facebook fan page for the book is here. Make sure to check out these other stops on the blog tour:

Full Disclosure: Jennifer Woodruff Tait has been a friend of mine since 2001. I also got a free copy of the book as part of the tour. But it is, also, very good, and I am certain I would think so if I didn't know her and had bought my own copy. (Actually as it happens, I did buy my own electronic copy because I left the free copy somewhere while traveling... but I digress.) Anyway: point is, she's great, she's a friend, but the book is great too. And now on to the actual post.]

I have Anabaptist in-laws, as I may have mentioned once or twice here. They don’t have any form of plain or distinctive dress — no cape dresses, no coffee filter hats or doilies or anything, although my husband’s mother and his paternal aunts did wear headcoverings as girls, and my father-in-law remembers the first time he parted his hair on the side and came down the stairs wondering if there would be repercussions. But although distinctive dress is not part of their lives anymore, abstinence from alcohol is less of a distant memory. My parents-in-law still do not drink alcohol. My husband’s sisters have wine only on occasion, and my husband went to a dry college (no dancing, eiher) and has never consumed alcohol to the point of intoxication. (Although he does drink beer, which I hadn’t realized was more controversial than wine until I happened to mention it in passing to one of my sisters-in-law – who is a lovely person, mind you – and she said “Phil drinks BEER?” with the sort of disturbed, italicized inflection that you might use to say… oh, I don’t know… “Phil eats his TOENAILS?” Which, incidentally, he doesn’t.)

None of this is galling to me, although I find it strange and interesting. What has been a little goat-getting, though, is the use of grape juice in communion. Or, no: not just the USE of grape juice in communion, because who cares? But the PRINCIPLED use of grape juice in communion. I mean – as I’ve asked Phil countless times – WHY? Wine is in the Bible. Jews used wine. The first Christians used wine. There wasn’t unfermented grape juice back then. It simply WAS WINE, people.

(Of course, I say this as someone whose father did public relations for a beer company, who got a merit scholarship funded by the national distillers union, and whose parents’ oenophilia to this day might possibly keep a few small California vintners in business. Incidentally, Jen, if you wanted this post to have the sober (ha! I slay myself!) air of a book review in a scholarly peer-reviewed journal: um, sorry?)

But still! For a movement where “approximating the actions of Jesus as closely as possible” is the whole raison d’etre, I could not fathom how this glaring exception got a pass.

Jennifer Woodruff Tait isn’t writing about Mennonites. (Confidential to JWT: Next book? Pretty please?) But she is – as you can probably tell from the title – writing about the use of grape juice in communion by Methodists. And as it turns out, there’s a great deal more theological rationale than I ever considered. As Edwin points out in yesterday’s stop on the tour, this is one of the real strengths of the book: she takes seriously the theological rationale, rather than deciding (as has evidently often been argued) that they all must have been manipulated by, or unreflective about, the surrounding culture.

Not that culture played no role in forming the theological rationale. One of the really fun sections of the book – and there are a lot – comes early when she talks about how much alcohol people consumed in the 19th century. WOW. IT WAS A LOT, YOU GUYS. I mean, people were really drunk, often; and this led to antisocial behavior sometimes, as it does. And then you get people who are sick of the antisocial behavior and want to reform things. Temperance movements, if I understand correctly, married a desire to modulate or eliminate antisocial behavior, with the late-19th and early-20th century love of HYGIENE! and SCIENCE! and CLEANLINESS!

All right, so that was the context: but what was the specifically theological rationale for grape juice in communion? Again, this is really not a time period I’m comfortable with, so you should read the book yourself to hear from an expert. But the idea seems to have been that part of what “we” (good Christians) should be about is seeing things rightly and truthfully. And you can’t do that if you’re not thinking clearly. And what does alcohol do, if not muddle your ability to see things clearly — as in, actually use your senses properly and form truthful ideas based on those sense-impressions? (Alcohol, but also romanticism, emotionalism, superstition, etc.) But surely (the thinking goes), God wills that we see things correctly and reasonably… therefore eucharistic wine can’t possibly require these sense-impairing properties. And out of this comes the two-wine theory: the idea that pure wine is wine in which there is no alcohol, because such wine does not interfere with the use of sense and reason.

(Evidently they also really, really, really liked water. So clean! Washes away the dirt! Let’s sing a hymn about it! Of course Christianity already had the baptism ritual, so that was covered.)

Anyway: there’s a lot more there, but this post is already in danger of becoming tl;dr – worthy. Let me say just two things: First, although this is a scholarly book, I could imagine giving it to my (intelligent, well-read, nonspecialist) father-in-law and having an interesting conversation based on it. So, you know, three cheers for clear academic writing!

Second: I’d like to think that any book I read changes me, a little but. But honestly, this one did more than most. Because it caused me to realize that the “Duh-you-guys-it’s-wine-in-the-Bible” eyerolling move is not only very overdone, but also very class-freighted and, well, snobby. And not even creatively snobby. It’s a product of its time and social location at least as much as eucharistic grape juice is. So: that’s not a comfortable thing to realize, but it’s probably important.

It’ll be interesting to see what the other posts say. Meanwhile, I don’t know if Jen will be able to hang out in the comments, but either way: any questions?

(Note: Continuing in my trend of being a Douglass Blvd Christian Church fangirl, I want to extend a warm Seedbed welcome to Ryan Vasuveda Kemp-Pappan, associate minister at DBCC and instigator of holy shenanigans all over. We’re very honored to have him guest posting here! DBCC, as you may remember from Derek Penwell’s guest post, is the church that bravely voted – unanimously – that they would stop signing marriage licenses until marriage equality was a reality in Kentucky. Because my Facebook notifications were all messed up, the following awesome post actually languished for two weeks before I realized that Ryan had actually written it, out of the goodness of his heart, and was trying to let me know that it was there, ready to go live. Apologies, all — and welcome Ryan! Thanks for gracing our blog!)

This past week I was tending to my Facebook crime empire and harvesting virtual crops when a little red bubble number popped up. I clicked it and read that I was tagged in a note. I clicked the little red bubble and was brought to an article regarding, Melissa Petro.

Melissa Petro is a 20-something elementary school teacher from New York that was dismissed from her job when she spoke out for sex worker rights and revealed that she herself was once a prostitute in an article on The Huffington Post.

I had not heard of this story before as I do in fact live under a rock. I read the linked story and the comments following the article. Then I followed the rabbit trail and read articles with headlines like, “Bronx hooker teacher blabs on about past”, “Bloomberg wants hooker teacher yanked from classroom” and “Bronx art teacher with X-rated past hires Allred.”

I was overcome with emotion as I read the comments that folks dispensed. The anger and hate that washed over this young lady was amazing. Judgment passed out like it was Halloween candy. Moral high ground defended like it was the front of the beer line at Dodger Stadium. I could not believe some of the comments I read. I wondered what the reaction would be if the former prostitute had been a male.

The school Ms. Petro was teaching in school from what I can gather is a chronic underperforming school in a neighborhood that deals with the hardship of poverty, crime & unemployment with a need for caring, creative teachers. I imagine the life experience that Ms. Petro could bring to the relationships she develops with her students and their parents would be invaluable. Apparently, one must not have a past that forges creativity and passion to mold our children. So then who do we want shaping the minds of our children?

I wonder if the fear behind Ms. Petro’s past is not the same fear that many folks apply to same-sex marriage, the LGBTQ community and “dissenting” sexual practices. Most folks pointed to Ms. Petro’s past as a prostitute as a marker of her inability to properly teach our children.

I am a minister in a faith community and have been charged to explore ways to live out a corporate and individual faithful response to the Gospel message of Jesus the Christ. What would happen if I were subject to my past in a like manner as Ms. Petro? Do the demons of my past bind me to a life of disgrace and perpetual penance lived out in the banning of full participation in the life God has called me to?

If they did I would not be writing this as a faith leader. In my profession the rough growing edges of life are ever present. You can’t help but remember the pain and loss you experienced in life when you are sitting with someone that has lost their best friend and lover. You can’t get to far away from those “difficult habits” of life when you are witnessing the shattered life of those left behind in the wake of addiction.

I am not sure if ones personal story is viewed as a strength in any profession really. I do think it should. Our story is the only thing that is really ours. No one else owns my story. People flow in and out of my story but it has been God and I for the last 36 plus years.

It is out of our stories that we connect and nurture relationships that build community. It is in community that tomorrow hangs its hat. We cannot have a tomorrow san story. Story is very important.

I am not sure if Ms. Petro visits her teaching vocation in the same manner that I hold my vocation as a minister. I do not know the call story Ms. Petro experienced that brought her in to the teaching profession. I would wager that it is less about the millions of dollars she will make in a year and more about caring to nurture students and inspire them in to new life and a reframed reality that fuels hope for a better tomorrow.

Whatever the reasons are behind her former life or teaching life we will never know the whole story. To know the whole story requires a kind ear and relationship. This is the importance of story in this fearfully and wonderfully made world in action. We share, listen and live our story and it can draw us near or isolate us as we choose.

To be a faith leader in a Christian community demands that I offer my life as a living sacrifice in relationship to those stories that ebb and flow in to my story. Is this not the tootsie center of the Gospel of Jesus the Christ? To live as Christ lived calls me to the margins and to divest any power that I have to point to the voice of the persecuted.

If I am to take the “first shall be last and the last shall be first” thing seriously I must not focus upon my survival but the survival of the other. To call myself a follower of Jesus I cannot horde, collect or tuck away idols of life. I must invest in the other and take seriously the call to challenge the status quo. As a believer in Jesus the Christ, I am compelled to embrace death as new life & live as though I am dead.

There is no room for judgment of others in a Gospel laden with challenging tyrannical powers that bind us to the suffering of this world. Jesus’ story reframes this suffering for us and offers us a new way. It is the story of God that departs from glory to be with us and light a path towards salvation. Jesus’ story is more about the salvation found “here” in community, in our stories than Jesus’ story is about that something over there, just out of our reach in that hazy cloud of “not yet.”

The Seedbed is very honored to welcome Derek Penwell, senior pastor of Douglass Boulevard Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Louisville, Kentucky and lecturer at the University of Louisville in Religious Studies and Humanities. He is the author of articles ranging from Stone/Campbell history to aesthetic theory and the tragic emotions. He is a graduate of Great Lakes Christian College (B,R.E.), Emmanuel School of Religion (M.A.R.), Lexington Theological Seminary (M.Div. and D.Min.), and a Ph.D. in humanities at the University of Louisville. He currently blogs at The Company of the Eudaimon, on [D]mergent, and on Twitter at @reseudaimon. Penwell frequently crochets Mexican serapes from the tattered remnants of repurposed 1970s tube socks.

It is a tenet of liberal Enlightenment faith that belief and knowledge are distinct and separable and that even if you do not embrace a point of view, you can still understand it. This is the credo Satan announces in Paradise Regained when he says, most men admire / Virtue who follow not her lore (I, 482-483). That is, it is always possible to appreciate a way of life that is not yours. Milton would respond that unless the way of life is yours, you have no understanding of it; and that is why, he declares in another place, that a man who would write a true poem must himself be a true poem and can only praise or even recognize worthy things if he is himself worthy. (Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle, 247).

Over the last 10 days, Ive had occasion to be congratulated and insulted (usually with a lot of capital letters), since Douglass Boulevard Christian Church, where I am senior minister, voted to support marriage equality by refraining from signing marriage licenses until LGBTQ people are extended the same rights. It is surreal to watch people whove never met you argue about what kind of person you are. Some people are certain that I wear my hair long to cover up devils horns. Others have suggested that our stand at DBCC must signal some latent truth about my own sexuality. While, still others are convinced that I recline only on beds of freshly pick spring flowers, tended to by angels still in their probationary period. But, for the most part, its difficult to take any of it too seriously. They dont really know much about me apart from a few news reports.

There is one criticism, though, that I find difficult to look past. It goes something like this:

The bible clearly says that homosexuality is wrong, and if you say its not, then you must not believe the bible. In fact, youre only doing what youre doing because youre a liberal boot-licker. Any good Christian can see that you only care about a left-leaning social agenda, not about obeying Jesus. You should just drop the pretense, and quit calling yourself a Christian.

Underlying this allegation is an assumption that I think liberal Christians need to challenge vigorously and often. Sentiments like this, it seems to me, center on the conviction that what is most important about following Jesus is believing all the right things about him (e.g., the correct human/divine ratio, the substitutionary nature of the work he accomplished on the cross, the precise blend of personal ethical maxims, capitalist free-market economics, and national pride, etc.). If you happen to raise questions about any of those, or, more actively, to offer disagreement, you will have ventured into some form of vicious heterodoxy unknown since the days of Torquemada. That is to say, that well-known 1960s Christo-hippie chorus has been transformed at the hands of some Christians, so that now it proclaims that they will know we are Christians by our appropriately worded bumper stickers. This presumption of the necessity of verbalizing correct belief is what constitutes Christianity for some folks. If you know the right answer, you should be fine. On this account, the churchs job primarily revolves around disseminating correct information, while enthusiastically seeking to overwhelm those whom it perceives to be its opponents.

The claim that I think liberal Christians ought to defend more scrupulously, however, is that the actions they take, the positions they stake out are not merely self-conscious attempts to avoid taking scripture seriously. Quite to the contrary, in fact. The liberal Christians I know seek justice for the poor, the marginalized, the powerless precisely because they believe that in so doing they are being faithful to the witness of scripture. That liberal Christians don’t view the bible as some sort of casuistic step-by-step guidebook to discerning, for instance, whether God opposes any Rock ‘n Roll not preceded by the qualifier “Christian” doesn’t mean that they don’t value scripture as authoritative, any more than saying that conservative Christians who read the Sermon on the Mount and come away from the experience believing that “Jesus would have been cool with thermonuclear weapons” means that they don’t value Jesus as authoritative. It really comes down to the interpretative strategies one employs–an issue I won’t try to solve here. My point is that though liberal Christians read the bible with a different set of assumptions about the kind of truth the bible is capable of producing, it does not follow that they are not committed to the bible–or, less generously, that they are not even Christians–just because they don’t share the same set of assumptions as conservative Christians.

I am aware that my description of the value placed on scripture by liberal Christians will be heard by conservative Christians as rationalization, as merely a justification for making the scriptures say whatever liberal Christians want them to say. And that, I think, is the problem. It is this primary posture of suspicion that forecloses conversation. To say that liberal Christians have some ulterior motive in interpreting scripture (while conservative Christians “just read the clear truth of what’s there”), is to begin from the premise that liberal Christians are either the overeager but unwitting dupes of 19th century German theologians or 20th century French philosophers, or that they are evil dissemblers disguising themselves as Christians for the purpose of . . . what? I’m not sure. On this reading, liberal Christians are being led around by the nose at the hands of their cigarette-smoking post-structuralist overlords, or they are the mendacious toadies of the coming one-world government. (Let me be quick to point out that liberals can shut off conversation with the same kind of dismissiveness–namely, conservatives as handmaidens of a discredited form of overconfident Enlightenment rationalism, or as rubes and hicks who learn theology at the feet of preachers who’ve spent too much time in front blow-dryers.) I think liberal Christians ought not to cede the hermeneutical high-ground.

It’s not that liberal Christians are trying to figure out the most diabolical ways to dismantle “old-fashioned Christianity”; instead, the liberal Christians I know love Jesus so much they can’t imagine living in a world organized and structured in ways that would grieve him by doing harm to those whom he loves. Liberal Christians, in other words, aren’t just trying to speak the poem correctly; they are, as Milton said, trying to be the poem. Because as Christians we believe that scripture isn’t something first to be understood, and then lived. It first to be lived, with the hope that understanding will meet us somewhere along the way.

That the way liberal Christians go about honoring Jesus’ compassion and concern for justice for those on the outside subverts some conservative ways of reading scripture shouldn’t surprise us. Jesus was always stomping about in someone else’s petunias, always dismantling traditional expectations of who’s in power, and who ought to go to the back of the line. He was all about breaking down the walls everyone had always thought were insuperable. I’m not sure what they call it now, but in liberal Christianity we call it Easter. And Easter’s as subversive as it gets.

It’s Easter Sunday and I am grumpy and tired and it’s raining and my son has just learned to whistle and WILL NOT STOP PRACTICING IT. Meanwhile – just as background, if you’ve been wondering about where I am – I have been getting in debates hither and yon about whether:

1) It is better to have a liberal method (i.e. “We welcome all views with an open mind and a charitable tone, due to the awareness that we may be wrong”); OR it is better to have actual progressive convictions (i.e. “No, seriously, oppression of queer folks/women/people of color/people with disabilities/poor folks is actually objectively bad, and this is a claim I make and hold, and don’t think might be wrong.”)

2) It is better for people in positions of authority to absolutely FALL OVER themselves trying to gently, gently convince their more-privileged charges that they really ought to listen to less-privileged folks, even if that looks suspiciously like, oh, pretty much EVERY OTHER unjust system ever where the most-privileged have attention lavished upon them and everyone else is kindly invited to shut up and not raise any icky-poo uncomfortable conflict drama; OR… not.

Similar themes, no? Two different conversations. Hard conversations. With people I care about and admire and hate disagreeing with. And if you know me at all, you probably know that I come down squarely in the latter camp. But, anyway, now it’s Easter. And those conversations have me thinking about why I or anyone else should care.

“Resurrection” is an Easter-only word for many Christians, practically a technical term. That’s what Easter’s supposed to be about: Jesus’ resurrection, often taken to mean Jesus’ resuscitation. The payoff of which is often understood to be, “Hey! I don’t have to die, after all. Hooray! Well, I mean, I have to die, but it’s all pretend, because I’ll be in heaven, or else maybe asleep to be revived later.”

Or, for the crunchy intellectually earnest lefty-evangy Christians, it’s an Easter-and-Wendell-Berry word: We PRACTICE resurrection. We grow fancy chard in our backyards and we come to deep moral convictions based our fearlessness toward death, and we consult said convictions whenever we are asked What Other People Ought To Do, In Theory.

Yeah, well… yeah. Can we talk about something else, though, for a minute? Once there was a Palestinian Jew, born as a refugee, possibly a landless day-laborer or possibly middle class, who while he was alive lived in relative obscurity — as most people who’ve ever lived do — and then was tortured and killed by the government for insurrection: exactly none of which would have been seen as remarkable in that day. Later some of his friends talked about his death in a way which suggested they believed him to be a martyr, and believed God to have vindicated his death as (so they believed) God vindicates all the righteous martyrs.

This is the point in the story where those of us who have been appointed religious authorities on matters Jesusy sometimes like to say “AHA!” loudly. “It was GOD who vindicated the righteous martyr. Not US. Therefore (fingerwag, fingerwag) you Really Ought Not Try To Bring About Justice Through Human Means Because It’s God Who Does It.” The only justice worth striving for is one which proceeds from proper theological principles.

I suppose that’s one way to see it. This week I watched an online discussion unfold about EXACTLY WHICH white male evangelical pastor endorsed wives submitting to domestic violence, and to PRECISELY WHICH degree they each endorse same, and WHAT SCRUPULOUSLY EXACTING LEVEL OF NUANCE might be brought to bear upon the VERY SUBTLE WAYS in which such endorsement does and does not reflect upon the religious organizations with which they are affiliated, and EXACTLY WHICH claims the various debaters were using to defend their arguments and whether they were logically sound, and EXACTLY WHAT view of scripture and tradition you have to hold in order to not endorse wife-beating for reasons which are THEOLOGICALLY ABOVE REPROACH.

Because where domestic violence is concerned, clearly the most important thing is to be theologically above reproach. (My husband, God bless him, finally got in there and said “Wow, dudes. You sure showed each other. In all your back and forth you never mentioned or told the story of a single woman. How about you think about that? Meanwhile, here is a link to a domestic violence shelter in your area. They are looking for volunteers.”)

So, yeah, that’s one way of looking at it. Since vindication is coming from God, we’d better be sure we don’t seek any sort of vindication that doesn’t proceed logically and unassailably from theologically-defensible views of God.

Hey, though! Here’s another possibility: People who’ve been martyred — or squashed, ground up, strung up, exploited, hit, had their bodies used to signify less-than-human, mocked, beaten up in restrooms to the point of seizure, insulted, spat on, thrown in jail, etc. — have vindication coming that they don’t depend on our well-intentioned largesse for, fellow earnest do-gooders who are in a position to have a well-thought-out position. Maybe that’s what is meant by God’s vindication.

So, ergo, I submit: Either Easter has no truth in it whatsoever (in which case, don’t get me wrong, I’m totes down the bunnies and the chocolate and the eggs and the Peeps) or else vindication is coming. And it’s NOT coming about as a result of our earnest mullings-over, or our careful placating and ego-stroking and concern above all to keep from giving offense. And it is DEFINITELY NOT coming such a way that you have to have a proper view of scripture/authority/theological method before you’re allowed to care abot people being beaten. (JUST AS AN EXAMPLE.)

I honestly don’t know which is true, some days. Some days it’s a struggle to believe there’s anything more lasting than Peeps. Sometimes it’s other Christians making the religious version of Easter look implausible. Some days, in some eyes, I’m sure, it’s me doing the very same.

Theologians “Discover”, “Interpret” New Apocalyptic Texts

Biblical Scholars Can’t Believe This Shit, Again

A faculty/student research team at Pretentious Thinky School of Christian Bizness   (PTSCB) recently “discovered” a heretofore untapped source of New Testament apocalyptic writing when they realized that significant parallels existed between the lyrics of the early works of Prince and the Book of Revelation.  Their work began in earnest when the faculty member leading the team spontaneously quoted the introductory voiceover to “Let’s Go Crazy,” leading to a deluge of lyric-citing from a number of students who really should have better things to do.

“Once you see it, it’s really obvious.  I don’t know why people have missed this for the past 20 years,” said ethics student Anne Grady, who participated in the project while taking a break from her “real work” of writing a document purporting to be an “existentialist interrogation of defense contracting manuals.” 

Grady continued before she could be interrupted, “‘Let’s Go Crazy’ is set within the context of liturgy in the first place, where the community is ’gathered together, to get through this thing called life,’ to tell and enact the stories that form it and thus enable it to, well, ‘get through.’  It seems obvious that what follows has some kind of Scriptural resonance.  And then when my colleague and classmate Belinda Jones cited the key text, ‘There’s something else/The afterworld . . . A world of never ending happiness/U can always see the sun, day or night,’ we immediately saw the correspondence to Revelation 22:5.” 

(Rev.  22:5:  And there will be no night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.)

She continued breathlessly, “Of course, who is ‘she,’ the archetypal woman in the raspberry beret, the one who ‘if it was warm, wouldn’t wear much more’? Is she none other than the ‘woman . . . clothed in purple and scarlet’ of Revelation 17:4, who is ‘drunk with the blood of the saints’? The author may ‘think [he] love[s] her,’ but really she’s just a big metaphor for Rome.  And obviously there I mean the Empire, and not the Catholic Church, let’s be clear.  ‘Raspberry Beret’ is a narrative of resistance to the oppressive rule of the beast, Mr. McGee, and his five-and-dime American consumer-capitalist dystopia selling cheap crap.  You can read it back into Rome and simultaneously forward into Walmart and America.  It’s CRUCIAL, PEOPLE!” 

Members of PTSCB’s Biblical Studies department were frustrated but not surprised by this non-professional foray into Scriptural interpretation by “people who keep their Bibles on a top shelf, because it’s not like they use them or anything.”  One senior scholar, who wished not to be named, said, “well, it just goes to show two things.  First, the vernacular language Bible was a tragic mistake.  And second, that theology and ethics crowd is . . . hmmm . . . I just don’t UNDERSTAND them, at all.  I mean, was that supposed to be humor?”

It smells like sweat and desperation. Souls cry in anguish without ceasing. Others cling to what little they have in utter fear. There are children there… and all who are trapped in its grasp crave release… they crave freedom. You may have been there without recognizing it. Yes you may have walked through hell, but didn’t know it because you moved too quickly past the reception desk… toward the exit, and past the big red sign on which someone had obviously misspelled hell:

“H  o  m  e  l  e  s  s  S  h  e  l  t  e  r” … it said.

And it looks desolate… Like dirt and dead trees and sand dunes and diseased animal carcasses for miles. It looks like miles and miles of rolling “death valleys”.  It seems devoid of hope. There is no food there and the nearest stream of water is forty miles away. It is hell, indeed…

And it is in Africa.

And it is loud — so loud that its inhabitants rarely find rest. Who would sleep there anyway? Those who live there lie awake in fear and suffer from exhaustion. The sounds are distinct… banging and explosions, rattles and rockets. It is hell.

It is in the Middle East.

And it feels like darkness. It feels as though the energy and life and peace has been sucked from the atmosphere. It feels lonely and cold and uncertain. It feels forgotten and abandoned by God. It feels dangerous… It feels doomed and diseased. It is covered in signs that warn people to leave while they can. It feels far away, but is closer than we know.

It is right across the Pacific in Japan.

This is the hell I’ve come to believe in, and the only one of which I can conceive. I don’t need an afterlife theory to help me believe it. I don’t need a Bible interpretation to know it exists. I only know that it does, and I only know that its existence calls me to think differently about theology, and the Bible, and God.  It is the only hell I know.

Cross-posted from tam121.wordpress.com …

The images pile up as inexorably as … well, the cars, trucks, boats and trains caught in  Japan’s tsunami, so many life-size vehicles and houses turned into so much flotsam. The only problem is, it’s not just steel and wood twisting in the water. Human beings were washed away, or inundated, and their bodies are now washing back in, and surfacing. As are their images: lifeless and sea-washed, observed by grieving family members and exhausted rescue workers — and us.

Do we look? Do we look away? If we do not look, are we ignoring the plight of fellow human beings, irresponsibly contributing to our own numbness in the face of others’ tragedy? If we do look, is there a line to be wary of crossing, somewhere between responsibly informing ourselves and becoming consumers of disaster porn?

Even when I was a working journalist, I was a limited consumer of media, easily overwhelmed by television’s blare, and underwhelmed by newspaper’s short bites and heavy advertising. I tended more toward (public) radio and magazines. And then came 9/11 … I stopped watching television altogether on 9/12/01, when stations began re-runs of bodies falling from the towers, desperate suicides fleeing flames. Even public radio and long-feature magazines like The Atlantic turned jingo-istic to my mind.

And so, over the years, like many others, I have turned to selected Internet venues as my news sources; this trend is having unfortunate consequences. We are no longer regularly subjected to perspectives different from our own (although mass media have historically been oriented toward maintaining the status quo more than portraying or encouraging real diversities). It is even more lamentable that the tenets of impartiality and objective reporting have fallen into fairly complete disrepair. Back in my journalism days, we did know that our attempts to be impartial and objective were incomplete and imperfect, even at their best; but at least we were trying. It seems all to be infotainment and spin now.

The media ethics class I took in j-school back in the ’80s did not prepare us for the overconsumption of instantly available global horror stories. Religious ethics classes in the early years of this century didn’t, either.

But I don’t really need to be told. As a child in the 1960s, I knew the Viet and American dead on the television should not have been there (not dead, and not on television). My heart tells me now — and my mind believes — that it is disrespectful to fill our screens with the images of the dead in the Japanese disaster, just as it was wrong in the endless line of preceding disasters that have filled our insatiable craving for “news.”

I suppose these images are necessary to tell the whole story, and to spur relief contributions and efforts. I suppose my ideas that they are disrespectful to the dead are as old-fashioned as I am apparently becoming. I suppose I am being a spoiled and soft first-worlder in my reactions.

So be it. I adopt the spiritual practice of “custody of the eyes” just as I would in the face of any other pornography, and turn away from these images, when they come before me. I attempt mindfulness as I decide to turn away: I turn with prayer, as a gesture of respect. I am not trying to escape. I have made my contributions as I can, and if ways to do more become apparent, I will.

But for now, at the very least, I will draw the sheet of not-looking over the images of the dead. Those of you I have seen, I remember that you are people, that you loved, that you are missed and grieved, that you will live on in the memories of those who revere you. I will think of the Japanese life that I witnessed on a brief trip to this part of the world — the bustle and bullet trains of Osaka, the quiet deer and temple statuary of Nara, the tea-dyed brown hair and platform shoes of uniformed high-school kids, geisha stepping carefully along evening sidewalks.

I do not know you, Japan, but I know beauty is in you, and will return to you.

(cross-posted at hadhufang.wordpress.com 3/12/11)

There is a chant often used among those who worship the divine feminine:

She changes everything she touches, and everything she touches changes.

Yesterday, Gaia shrugged. Earth shuddered and the blanket we call the crust folded and slipped and twisted, and the bowl of liquid resting on her lap sloshed over the counterpane.

I have watched and heard many reports on the loss of life and devastation in Japan. I have great respect for the tremendous strength of the Japanese people and culture; they have lived on the edge of the Ring of Fire for longer than most current European cultures have existed. The Japanese standards for building construction are amazing; an 8.9 quake in or near any U.S. population center would have flattened entire cities and killed thousands. And earthquakes are not new to us, and the technologies are not that new either. We just don’t see the need. We have options that the people of Japan do not have–more land elsewhere, an enormous economy, e.g.–and we are relentlessly practical when it comes to the bottom line. If it won’t make a profit in the next quarterly or annual report, why do it?

It’s interesting that the coverage a few weeks ago about the massive quake in New Zealand did not seem to receive quite as much, or quite as thorough, coverage. There were very few live reports (I actually saw none, but I give the entire U.S. broadcast spectrum the benefit of the doubt) on the national media. The quake in New Zealand did not threaten a major trading partner or a fellow northern hemispherean, but perhaps more pertinently, did not threaten a tsunami that might make landfall on U.S. territory.

We are, consciously or not, drawn to tragedies that look like they will affect us, and we are relieved when they do not. We have the balcony seat in the theatre, eating our popcorn while we watch. Many individuals jump in to help; many organizations are designed to respond, and often we support them. Still, mostly we watch.

We also analyze, complain, pray, beseech, discuss, and otherwise process the experience–even the vicarious experience. We are creatures of the Earth, creatures of both viscera and intellect, and we must process our experiences. Some use art, music, movement, violence–and some use voice. When we discuss, often enough the conversation is about the uncertainty that this twitching of the Mother’s Body brings into our lives. We usually recognize that the uncertainty is far greater for those at the center of any natural disaster, but we want some sense of stability for ourselves.

We can’t have it. We can have the illusion we create for ourselves, but we cannot have certainty.

The Earth shrugs her shoulder and reminds us that we don’t control as much as we want to believe we do. She turns under the blanket of the landscape, tumbling us like toys. And we remember that we do not define the environment–we are not in charge.

She changes everything she touches, and everything she touches changes.

Just sayin’.