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?

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.

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.

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?”

All really sensible, logical questions, no?

But I’m realizing that issues like abortion are never about logic or reason. And I’m not saying that to denigrate one side or another for being illogical or too emotional so we won’t deal with them. God knows that women, and especially women of color, get that too often for us to start slinging that shit around to anyone else.

No, what’s been preying on my mind lately is the abortion issue and how it relates to a horrific philosophical gem by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. For one of my classes, we read his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. In this book, Agamben develops, among other things, his understanding of bare life, which is that which can be killed without penalty of homicide. This concept is drawn out of ancient Roman law, in which certain persons are designated as outside they protections or the honors of the law; their lives cannot be considered for sacrifice, for example as warriors in battle to protect the city, and they can be killed without any penalty. This state is related to the Roman notions of life that take two different forms: bios, which is political life, and zoe, or life that is just pure life outside the walls of the city. Bios, or political life, is not the life of institutional government as we understand politics today; rather, it is the methods of participation in public life, such as the requirement to take up arms in defense of the city, to take part in debates, etc. Bios, was, as you can guess, was limited; women, slaves, foreigners did not participate in bios.

According to Agamben, this notion of political life has been muted in modern life because we only have one way of designating life, zoe, and it can become quite problematic because we now must figure out ways to figure out what life is. When it begins, when it ends, what it is. Advances in technology have pushed our understandings of when life begins and when it ends, as well as what it is and how it works, to very fuzzy, very imprecise thresholds. The example that Agamben uses in the book is that of euthanasia, particularly cases in which someone must determine whether to keep a person in a vegetative state alive or to take steps to allow them to die. Agamben writes:

This means today … life and death are not properly scientific concepts but rather political concepts, which as such acquire a political meaning precisely through a decision. The “frightful and incessantly deferred borders” … are moving borders because they are biopolitical borders, and the fact that today a vast process is under way in which what is at stake is precisely the redefinition of those borders indicates that the exercise of sovereign power now passes through them more than ever and, once again, cuts across the medical and biological sciences. … Since it is precisely a question not of natural life but of an extreme embodiment of homo sacer (the comatose person has been defined as an intermediary being between man and an animal), what is at stake is, once agian, the definition of a life that may be killed without the commission of a homicide. (p. 164-165)

What Agamben is ultimately warning us about in Homo Sacer is the potential for that decision to determine the political meaning(fulness) of life to encompass all of us. As the system now stands, he indicates, we are all living under the potential designation of bare life; at any point, a decision could render us into the position of being killable without penalty. Far from being a call to valorize or protect or life, what Agamben is doing is pointing out that all borders for what determines life are always shiftable, because at some point there will be a sovereign decision about what life is. Yes, Agamben is speaking in extremes; after all, are we really at the risk of becoming killable without penalty?

Before you answer that question:

Think of how immigration policy has created walls all along the México-US border, except in the deadliest parts of the desert, so that migrants attempting to cross literally do it while risking their lives.

Think of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments.

Think of the money that wasn’t spent on infrastructure maintenance on the levees that broke around New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Think about the differences in health care that people experience because of income and access to health insurance.

And now think about Planned Parenthood. What I take from Agamben in this debate over women’s sexual and gynecological health is not that preborn/unborn children/fetuses are bare life. Rather, I’m very aware that the designation of bare life is based on a decision of power. In the way that we’ve set up the abortion debate, someone will be rendered through decision as bare life, either the woman or the child. And I am suspicious that the forces that decide women as bare life are not as invested in “protecting life” as they are in keeping the (patriarchal) power of that decision, a power that also determines women as killable without penalty, nor even grief. And it’s a decision that always shifts in favor of its own self-protection.

My question is whether it’s possible to have this discussion outside of that decision? Is there another way to imagine life that does not require this decision? I don’t know yet. But I wonder and ponder in my heart.

“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.

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.

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’.

There, I said it.

Yes, I hate a liturgical season; we’ve never gotten along very well, and I realize that it’s been a terrible relationship with faults and problems on both sides. I have always seen Lent as a dark, horrific season that begins with a reminder of death and then spends the next six weeks on a progressive march toward torture that culminates in the hell that is the Good Friday observance. This has probably been very uncharitable toward Lent, which is, after all, supposed to be more of a time of reflection and preparation for renewal. Or so I’ve been told. I just can’t quite see it. I see what Lent professes, and yet I feel that it is acting kind of two-faced, in which it talks a good game about renewal and then kicks its dog when it thinks I’m not paying attention.

I’ve been told that no one thinks about Lent the way I do. But here’s a little self-disclosure: I was raised very old-school German Roman Catholic, in a parish that was pretty grumpy about Vatican II, and the only real concession my hardcore Catholic child-of-German-immigrants grandmother made to Vatican II was being OK with the Mass being in English. In my family, we didn’t just abstain from meat on Fridays during Lent, but every Friday of the calendar. I was 18 before I had my first hamburger on a Friday (and I took my first bite with some anxiety, half-expecting that lightning would shoot out of the sky and peg me for the venal sinner that I was). We never ate a meal before Sunday Mass, and today I still get a little freaked out whenever someone in Sunday services offers me a mint during services, because not only am I eating before communion, I’m eating in church (cue search for lightning bolts). My mom was a big fan of Lent who made us pray the full rosary every night, complete with mysteries, as a Lenten devotional practice, with particular attention to the Sorrowful Mysteries.

Every Good Friday we got out of school to attend a midday Stations of the Cross service, taking whatever Protestant friends who wanted to get out of school for the afternoon with us in order to contemplate Jesus’ slow torture and violent death. I was surprised at the general public’s freak-out at Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, because all it is is Stations writ large and bloody and campy.

I’m also violently allergic to palms, making Palm Sunday a pretty painful experience in its own way. But anyway.

What I remember most distinctly about Lent is the focus on the torture and death, and its liturgical glorification. I was a very sensitive kid, and staring up at the dead, bleeding Jesus on the implement of execution every Sunday morning was hard enough. But starting with Lent, that’s when we really started to focus on it. That’s when that torture got pointed out in every detail. My mom would have to take me to the “cry room” in the back of the church nearly every Sunday during Lent because I would start hysterically weeping in horror about everything I was hearing. Admittedly, I was a kid sensitive to death because I grew up with it all around me, permeating my entire life. My mother has mourned the death of my father, who died suddenly and unexpectedly six months before I had been born, all her life. His ghost in the form of her deep sadness haunted our home and every aspect on our living. When the talk of death started to kick up in church, it was not the Holy Ghost that I could look for for salvation, but only the mundane spirit of my lost father that stole all that was life and light from the heart of my family.

But there was another aspect to the Lenten focus on Jesus’ march toward death that upset me. It was its glorification. It was the fact that this man that we professed to love so much was going to be killed, and we were not only NOT upset about it, but we were HAPPY about it. He was going to be tortured and executed and it was a GOOD thing. And NO ONE was doing anything about it. Here was hurt and death and torture right before us, and NO ONE CARED. I wept at the uncaring. I wept at the disregard. Maybe I was really weeping at the fact that my mother’s pain was so roundly ignored, but it expressed itself in the form of mourning for Jesus, whom we were sending to the cross with practically a ticker-tape parade.

Now that I’m a bona fide theologian (cue anxious search for lightning bolts) I understand three things: 1) the various theories of atonement 2) that my experience of Lent as death season was informed mostly by my own personal hauntings and sorrows and 3) that the season really isn’t supposed to focus so much on the torture of Jesus but as a preparation for the resurrection of the Christ, the radical breaking-in of God-with-us in the world, and the eschatological vision of a world reigned by God in which we have our daily bread every day and our debts are forgiven. And that helps, but …

I attended Ash Wednesday services this year, and I found myself re-traumatized by Lent again. Because there in the hymns and the practices were the glorification of the death of a man whom we profess to love, liturgies and hymns awash in the blood of torture and execution. It was, as Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker put it in their book Proverbs of Ashes, cosmic child abuse staring me right in the face. And even the recognition that the Lenten season is supposed to be one of repentance twists me inside, because what we are repenting for is the sins that lead us unto death. Which, I felt like, is a moment of victim blaming, that we deserve our deaths because of our behavior, because of our actions, because of who we are.

I recognize that these atonement theories and that these ways of expressing our understandings of cross and resurrection will vary from church to church, from individual to individual. And that my own understandings of what I experienced on Ash Wednesday are still haunted by my childhood. My assertion of victim-blaming only holds true if I follow traditional and individualistic understandings of cross, atonement and Lent, and my traumatic Ash Wednesday points to how deeply embedded these haunted understandings still are in my theological mindmap. I can turn this by rethinking, reimaging, re/presenting, re/membering.

But I also think we live in a culture in which victims are blamed for their wounds, where violence is glorified, where we walk about atop the bones of others, ignoring the crunch beneath our feet because the sound clashes with the songs in our hearts about our own living. We buy our lives at the expense of others’ lives. And I wonder how much Christian theology has contributed to making that understanding. And what a theologian can do to turn us away from those understandings (the meaning of the word repent, to turn away) toward something in which we give life to make life, rather than paying for life through someone else’s death.

Likely, this is my Lenten practice this year, to mull this out.