Denial

“Deny yourself: take up your cross”

Say what?

This was all good, Jesus, until you got all morbid.

Suffering? Really?  And death?

I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been listening

And, although I think you’re right,

let’s not go too far, here.

You’re walking a narrow path, my friend,

between Temple and Empire,

and you’ve always maintained the balance.

What changed? What do you know?

Deny ourselves? Shall we cut ourselves off from our people,

our families, our communities, our faith?

Shall we push change so hard that they ostracize us,

shun us, cut us from their body

so the infection cannot spread?

Take up our cross? Quite the image…

We are not criminals to be killed by slow torture:

What offense do we give the Empire

that they should crucify us, hang us up as examples?

I don’t get it, Jesus – are you asking us to die?

to make such a fuss that we must be silenced

ridiculed and humiliated?

Do we really have so much power?

Do they really have so much fear?

I guess we do get a pretty big crowd…

How many did we feed the other day?

Three thousand?  Five?  Somewhere in there.

And perhaps you can’t sit forever between a rock

and a hard place.

One or the other will give, eventually;

either to open up some space

or to squish whomever is between.

And, I suppose, better to prepare for the coming squish

better to expect it

to choose to live in that precarious space

In case, whatever happens,

squish or crack,

the space opens up to reveal God.

John Lewis’ Selma

It’s for the best,

she decided,

One moment of pain

a betrayal that wasn’t

couldn’t be, (right?)

if to spare the beloved

a lifetime of suffering.

Be hopeful.

 

Peaceful living in wartime chaos

the resistance of embodied love

among a few

tortures the heart already pierced

by each life lost;

narrows focus until

violence appears the only path

for ending violence.

Until one life seems a small price to pay

to ransom millions.

Be positive.

 

Drunk on grief

marinated in the power of anger and hate

the desire to eradicate

to annihilate

all who ressemble –

– even in the superficial, the external –

the apparent cause

of all that bubbles within

seethes and writhes,

seeking an outlet;

the desire to wipe the slate clean,

to rub out offensive words

or ideas

burns with single-minded intensity.

Do not become bitter.

 

Face to face with a story not our own

face to face with pain

and implications of complicity!

Moan aloud, exclaim

not for the wounded heart before you

but rejecting responsibility

“Not all!” – and turn away before the shatter

skewers you with flying shards.

Or hostile.

 

Hope would be a simpler thing

if it came with bright light and rainbows

if the valley of the shadow of death weren’t so…

Dark.

Peace would be simpler

if it caught our attention

spread among us with the fire

of passion

To walk in the light is to be

above all else

vulnerable,

open to the aching

convulsing pain that humanity suffers;

open to it in our own lives

tightly bound to the lives of others.

To hope without hostility

is to trust that no valley is endless

that no night endures forever

that joy comes in the morning.

To live in peace without bitterness

is to find the right, and remain

calm in the midst of chaos

focused on all that can be

rather than what cannot.

To love is to remember that hope and peace endure

by the grace of God –

– whom we are not.

Love is a better way.

The Venom Within

The people came to Moses and said,”We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people.  And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” – Numbers 21: 7-8

This is a strange story.  Out in the wilderness, the Israelites take yet another turn on their way to the Promised Land, and they grumble… as they have been nearly since the beginning, but now the length of the journey, the uncertainty about direction, the instability of living as itinerant people is really getting to them. Egypt, even with slavery isn’t looking so bad – at least they had roofs over their heads, structure to their days, and some certainty in their lives.

Hindsight isn’t always 20/20.

And in the tradition of children from time out of mind, the backseat whining begins. I’m tired. I don’t like what you packed for lunch. Miriam pushed me. I’m thirsty. How much farther? No, it is NOT my turn to walk next to Aaron! Manna again? I’m sick of manna! Do we hafta sing camp songs? Are we there yet?

And God, sick of the whining, sent venomous snakes to stop the complaining.

Or something like that.

This week, the president of Oklahoma University expelled two students and suspended the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, after a video was posted of fraternity members singing their chapter’s song – a song which included an N word that I won’t say here, and the gleeful promise that no African-Americans would ever be a part of the fraternity. The University and its president, David Boren, were lauded for their rapid response to the video… and indeed, it was good to see the incident treated with all of the importance that it deserved. Still, it gave many people pause when Mr. Boren, commenting on the university’s actions, said,

Real Sooners are not racist. Real Sooners are not bigots. Real Sooners believe in equal opportunity. Real Sooners treat all people with respect.

There are venomous snakes among us, but we will get rid of them. We will not allow their poison to harm us all. Because we are not them, and they are not us.

It’s a lovely thought, that we can so easily get rid of the snakes among us. But it is not a helpful one, necessarily, as Drake University professor Jennifer Harvey noted:

We must refuse a logic of punishment whereby we stand and point at the immoral behavior of others, as if they are unique and different from us and the environments that produced them. We must refuse to distance ourselves — or the environments we have helped to shape — from their racist behavior.

If I am a Sooner and that Sooner over there has been exposed embracing, with great relish, white supremacist rhetoric and behavior, and my response is to say, “Well that Sooner isn’t real,” I exonerate myself and the community that produced that oh-so-real Sooner from responsibility. I foreclose already and ahead of time the myriad of levels of inquiry, response and intervention urgently needed into the environment(s); an environment that these young people’s behavior offers powerful evidence of as being itself deeply toxic and racist.

If those young men (and women) aren’t real Sooners, then what on Earth are they?

If they are not us, then what are they? And who are we?

It’s a lovely, convenient way to tell the story: that God sent poisonous snakes, as though they were a punishment against the complaining, faithless Israelites. God sent something separate. The venom did not arise from within the community; did not spring from the fears born of years in the wilderness, twisting and winding towards a distant promise, fighting local tribes and hoping that each day would bring fresh food. If we can talk of snakes, then we can hope that the venom did not come from those neighbors within the community whom we’re supposed to love, even though we’d really prefer to keep them at arm’s distance; didn’t come from those who look like us, who have traveled with us, who are beloved by the same God as we are.

If we can blame the snakes, then maybe the poison is not within us, as well… perhaps expelling the snakes will be enough to keep us safe, to ensure that the community is actually healthy, and faithful, and living into the covenant promises that include getting up to the promised land eventually.

We like to blame the snakes, and to blame God for their presence – God who created everything… even whiny, impatient Israelites. Even privileged frat boys singing a racist chant. Even us.

If we can blame the snakes, perhaps we won’t have to look quite so hard at ourselves. If we can be rid of the snakes, then maybe we don’t have to wonder where they came from, these venomous whispers of fear and frustration that arise and seep within us. We don’t have to recognize all that we have done, or left undone, to foster a culture in which such snakes can exist, in which such whispers can find fertile ground. We don’t have to recognize the myriad ways that our own words, our own silences, nurtured the snakes and kept them safe.

If we can blame the snakes, we don’t need to look for any other source of the poison.

But that poison is there.

The poison is in the hugely disproportionate number of African-American men who are arrested and charged with minor offenses. It is in the fact that those men are 21 times more likely to be shot during the arrest. It is in our defensive reaction to those numbers.

The poison is in the story of a Harvard professor arrested while trying to get into his own home. It is in the stories of women of color, whose bodies are consistently seen as both more sexualized and more criminalized.

The poison is in us all, as a recent study of the American Psychological Association demonstrated that after the age of nine, we tend to see African-American and Latino boys as being both older and more culpable than they actually are… which explains, although it does not excuse, the perception of boys as young as 12 being active threats, and shot in an excess of precaution. And the poison is in us when jokes made about the president not serving out his term – because, apparently, black men can’t hold consistent jobs for four years – are assumed to be funny, rather than offensive and prejudiced.

And the poison is in the shooting of police officers, whether because they are viewed as the carriers of venom, as snakes to be got rid of, or because of the need to inject violence into non-violent demonstrations.

The poison is there, and removal of the snakes – those whose words and actions are overtly hurtful or offensive – cannot remove the poison from us entirely. The poison is there and all our prayers that the snakes be taken back, that those among us who are not «real» – really faithful, really loving, really trusting in the God who removed us from slavery – are met only with another snake. All are prayers are met with the simple reassurance that the venom need not be fatal… even though the snakes are still there.

And so a snake of bronze was created, that those who looked upon it might live. Not an idol, this time – not a golden calf, worshiped in place of God, but an icon – an image that directs our minds, our prayers, towards God. A lens, of sorts, which refocused our scattered, poisoned thoughts, and brings us once again into relationship, sets us once again on the right path.

I had the fortune, this week, of reading the reflections of Rev. Mike Kinman, dean of Christ Church Cathedral in St. Louis. He was present among the protesters on the day of the shooting, and had this to say:

My heart is breaking that violence is nothing new to us. That our Cathedral nave is filled with the faces of young people killed on St. Louis streets by guns. That there has been far too much blood shed and far too much pain.

My heart is breaking – and as painful as that is, I have come to believe that our hearts are supposed to break. Because we live in a world of pain and hurt. And in the face of it, our hearts will either break like God or harden like Pharaoh, and given that choice, I choose the Lord…

God’s invitation to Moses was to lean into the suffering of the people – intimately lean into it to the point of sharing it. In God there are no “your tears” and “my tears” but every tear is “our tear.”

That runs the risk of sounding a little too kum ba yah. But it is anything but. It is an invitation to some of the hardest and most rewarding work there is – meeting at the foot of the cross. Meeting at that place of pain and not running away from it but leaning into it.

Like God throughout scripture, loving the people enough to let our hearts break … again and again and again…

Today, the anger, pain and confusion we have been experiencing as a community has a new dimension and depth. We need to wrestle with that. We need to lean into that. If our hearts are breaking, we can be comforted that they do not break alone. That God’s heart breaks, too. And if we are tempted to lean away. To let our hearts get hard because feeling the pain just seems too much to bear … well, we need to hold even more tightly to one another and to Christ. And wrestle more profoundly. And pray more fervently.

We are tempted to lean away – to make the snakes bear the full responsibility for our pain. We are tempted to dismiss the venom that flows in us as the “status quo”, to reflexively dismiss the possibility of our own heartbreak… and our own healing. We are tempted to turn away from the image of the bronze snake that is set before us in the stories of racism – overt and implicit – that just feel too toxic, too uncomfortable, too painful.

Yet the icon remains before us. We need to look at it, focus on it, allow it to call us back into relationship. If we are too afraid to acknowledge that our society remains deeply racist, we will remain mired in poison, mired in the sin that fractures our relationships with one another and with God.

Face to face with snake bites we have all endured; suffering with the poison that runs through us all, we are called to stop trying to get rid of the snakes – to stop scapegoating the loudest and most offensive, to stop thinking that they are somehow inherently different from us, that we are not all products of the same culture, infused with the same venom, suffering from the same disease. We are called to recognize our own poison, our own complicity.

Because the prayers of the Israelites did not make the snakes – their own neighbors – vanish. Rather, God called us to look directly at the source of pain, the source of venom, the source of all that keeps us separate from one another, keeps us from being the community we are called to be.

Healing, it turns out, comes not from suggesting that the poison is in someone else, but from the willingness to look directly at the source of our own disease.

Healing comes from not hardening our hearts to those who suffer most, who carry the most venom within themselves, but in recognizing the ways in which we have kept safe the snakes, rather than those most often bitten.

Healing comes from looking that snake right in the face – looking, intently and intentionally, upon that which has harmed us all – and in that very act, accepting our need for healing. In that very act of looking upon that which poisons us, we can begin to excise the venom, and heal the entire body. In that act of gazing upon our own poison, we may find repentance – the ability to change our minds and our hearts, and come back into the community that God has always intended for us to be.

We should, certainly, keep the snakes among us from doing the horrible damage that they can, so easily do. But let us not fall into the trap of thinking that punishing the snakes will cure us all. Rather, let us open our hearts to the suffering around us, the venom within. Let us allow our hearts to break, as we gaze upon the snake and recognize the ways we have been poisoned.

Let us look, with open eyes and open, breaking hearts at the venomous racism that cannot be eradicated by a couple of expulsions, that cannot be eradicated by violence or defensiveness or blame. For only by opening ourselves – only by the intentional acts of looking, hearing, loving, may that snake be turned from a symbol of death to a way back to relationship, back to life, back to the covenantal promises of life as God’s people. Only by opening ourselves to the poison in our own heart – to the ways we have nurtured the snakes rather than their victims – may we find healing for our bodies, for Christ’s body.

May we be unafraid to look, though our hearts may break again. May we be unafraid to look, that even as our own hearts break, all who have suffered this poison might find healing.

 

Perception

For those days when you do all the work:
Read everything possible
Talk it through
Push and pull, stretch and twist
Even write! And write again…
And still, despite it all,
(or perhaps because of;
all that preparation can be constipating)
You walk the dog –
-proudly, without
any indication of what an ugly
mangy mutt you see
at the end of that verbal leash –
We pray.
Still, we pray all the more
for the whispered rustlings
stirring among disjointed words;
for the flowing, and the crackle,
upward-seeping capillary phrasing
Spirit.
The one who grooms the matted fur
stripping away muddied words,
flea-bitten clichés…
Who trims away the snarls
And maybe even adds the bow-around-the-neck
of recognition
self-reflection
challenge
or Word
To the dogbreath-slobbery mess
I was trying to preach.
Come, Holy Spirit,
Even when I’m waking the dog.
Remind me that I do not walk it alone:
that some dogs are so homely they’re cute;
that all dogs were created by the One
who called me to this crazy preaching thing
in the first place,
And who will not let me fall so totally
flat
that I forget,
in my doggiest days,
I do not walk alone.
Some days we need the reminder that
even dogs,
with all their mess and slobber,
are a part of your creation.

Wiggle-Room

“Thou shalt not”

Doesn’t really leave us much

in the way of wiggle-room

So we play with that last word in the commandment.

Because “murder” gives us the leeway

to continue killing

when it’s convenient:

When we will benefit from death

in newly-accessible goods

in suddenly-attainable power;

When we use killing to control

those around us –

– easier by far than controlling ourselves.

“Murder” is that which happens to us

that which we cannot justify

by some dispelled fear

or righteous anger.

“Murder” is unreasonable, cruel,

the taking of innocent life,

valuable life, or maybe

life that looks, somehow, like ours.

And “thou shalt not,” we cry,

in the echoes of “Why did you shoot me?”

“Stop shooting”, “I can’t breathe”.

After silent hands raised in calm obedience

to a lesson taught by parents who weep

to teach it.

“Thou shalt not,” unless you feel your own life,

your own self, threatened

by twelve-year-old men playing

with the normal violence of their lives;

by faces you most often see as targets

through the crosshairs.

It isn’t “murder” if the victim wasn’t innocent:

lily-white and pure as snow,

child-like and angelic in face and speech,

as they cry to us for help.

“Thou shalt not,” we cry

in irony-free certainty:

‘Thou shalt not,” but if you do, the penalty

is death, which is not murder, though intentional;

an acceptable death: calm, reasoned,

we-regret-to-inform-you death

which is different, you know.

Because it is a death that will make us

feel safer, despite the statistics;

knowing killers have been mur-

no, that’s the wrong way ’round.

And it is not “murder” when we discuss it first –

-“it” the crime and “it” the criminal,

now one and the same,

sentenced by twelve who don’t consider themselves peers,

covetous of their privileged humanity,

determining the terms of life and death.

“Thou shalt not,” we cry,

until we cannot recognize ourselves

in the one humiliated,

carrying the means of his own death;

the human reduced to the sum of his crimes

Then we shout, instead,

“Killing is justified!”

“Killing is justice!”

Then we should instead,

“Crucify him!”

For we shall not murder – no, of course not.

We are not unreasonable,

not cruel or unusual –

– unfortunate, that.  Unusual

is the person who stands, weeping

at the foot of the cross.

For all the “shalt not”s we have manipulated,

justified, defended;

all the innocents tarnished by our fear,

all the sinners judged

by those who judge themselves worthy,

all of the humanity forgotten, denied –

– as it crucifies itself so that “thou shalt not”

but I still can.

Because it isn’t “murder” if it doesn’t hurt me,

if it’s not my body on the cross.

It isn’t “murder” if I cannot recognize the image

reflected back through one-way glass

from curtained execution-room sterility.

It isn’t “murder” when our sense of order

is upset by disruptive life

or the fear of life’s disruptions.

It isn’t murder until we ourselves stand convicted

without wiggle-room,

under the weight of our own sentence, our own phrasing;

staggering to the top of the hill we have created,

out of blind-justice-reason and the illusion of balanced scales.

We slip in the blood of countless “Thou Shalt Not”

and wonder: who will weep for me?

The Healing Power of Words

Someone said today that writing is not
             healing –
     -in writing, it should be noted.
Begging the question of what is healing
     after all?
For certainly, the act of putting pen to
             paper will not
     unfortunately
     cause the bleeding to stop.
Eyes will not be opened as the words
             are set forth;
     children shall not rise from their
             deathbeds
          suddenly literate,
     and I do not wonder that Jesus
             didn’t take the time
          to write his own story.
In his limited time, he chose to heal.
And yet…
I wonder if Mary, in her grief,
     kept a journal
     or wished she could;
     (did Peter? Or James, or Joanna,
             or Salome?)
     to hold the stories told over a fishy
             breakfast?
To keep the intimate, first-person details
     of shared story,
     to keep the perspective from shifting
     or, perhaps, to shift it?
To manipulate, tease, pull, sift, explore
     in such a way that the conversation
             continues;
     that the lost voice lives anew,
             beloved,
     suddenly audible in scratching
             stylus.
In the intimacy of stories kept close
     there is room enough to ask that
     which lodges in the throat
     which might bring blame, or shame,
          or pity.
Face to face, pen and paper call forth
             “Why?”
Why this body, this time, this anguish?
Why, now, was there no healing
     no miracle,
     though the curtain of my heart was
             rent asunder
     and my world is summer-noonday
             dark?
Why did Mary, Peter, Thomas even
     find reprieve before their grief
          was half-begun,
     while three days in –
          – three weeks, three months –
     the stone is not rolled back?
Writing does not heal. The voices fade
     in folded paper, unmoving pen.
Not in scribing but in speaking:
     Talitha cum! Lazarus come out!
     was breath restored and life renewed
          and yet…
In quiet resurrection party afterglow,
     did those same words,
             carefully traced
     calm the reverb of a still-palpable
             fear?
In the writing, in the holding,
     in the heart-hearing moment
     are the first stitches to mend the
             curtain,
     is the glimmer of sun in noonday
             darkness,
     is the first, rough filler
          in the crackled not-quite-shatter.
The words we commit to paper
     cannot restore breath
     and quicken only the heart
             already beating.
But in the grappling with memory,
     the rhythms and patterns
     that speak with stilled tongues
          to answer our desolation
     there is the healing:
     the promise of new life,
     miraculous as any
          fourth-day resurrection.