Sunday, December 1, 2013

The Anthroplogist Who Tried to Meditate in Cartagena de Indias


I haven't written here in a long while. My second year at seminary was a blur of church work, school work, sweat, tears, sleeplessness and falling in love. This autumn semester I have been able to take a hiatus, blessed be, and accompany my love in the strangely historic and forgetful city of Cartagena, Colombia. We live by the sea, supposedly, but the most I see of it on a daily basis is the rust from the salt and the mold from humidity. I wrote a poem recently and remembered that I have a blog. Perhaps this will be the start of a more internet-prolific phase in which I discuss matters of dislocated spiritual cultivation and sundry lived realities in Latin America.

The Anthropologist Who Tried to Meditate in Cartagena de Indias


I.
Some days she woke up when everything was already covered
in a film of sweet, sticky sweat
before the swampy dew of the night
had yet dried off clotheslines out on the patio.
Some days she set an alarm
and rose from the damp mattress in the dark
with an almost religious fervor.
She would get up and run down a dusty four-lane highway
that smelled like sulfur and dead animals
where buses had special horns to whistle at women
and vendors pushed their wooden carts
to God knows where at six in the morning.

II.
She would lie down on cool white linoleum tiles
that she swept daily of their dirt
until the wooden broomstick broke in half.
She tried to meditate with the subtle,
vibrating unity of the universe,
as she listened to the rhythm of flip-flips shuffling down the street
and electronic music blasting out of nightclub-sized speakers
that the neighbors on the corner would drag out front
to make the whole block jump as they walked.
Heavy bass beats made for grinding hips and genitals together
replaced her rhythmic breathing methods
with music to help you forget about oppression and love
and anything else that makes humans go to sleep at night
with the will to wake up the next morning.

III.
She walked to the corner store sometimes
to buy tomatoes, onions, or panela, the dark blocks
of condensed sugarcane that she had never needed in her diet
until she came to Cartagena de Indias with her boyfriend
and all her grant money ran out.
In this place she was only granted the privilege
of walking to the corner store to buy a few spare things
and to try not to look at anyone,
as if this would deter them from looking at her.
She finally learned what it is like not to study people,
but to be studied by them.
“Are you from Bogotá?” “Nena, do you play an instrument?”
She learned to be the exotic other that must be decoded.

IV.
Her boyfriend would come home from work in Flower of the Field,
the neighborhood where freshly rotting meat
and fermented sewage bloomed in the streets,
where the people were even poorer and had even larger sound systems.
He would tell her about the homes he visited
to take down data for microcredit loan groups,
where people evaded his questions with their winding tales
and gave him sticks of frozen juice and little cups of coffee.
Where tiny boys made lewd sexual gestures at tiny girls.
He told her about the carnivalesque parade
with the girls in shimmery dresses on handmade floats,
the songs beat out at last with the organic sounds of voices and kitchen utensils.
He told her about the children menacing with sticks and buckets of scum
to extract coins from him on every street corner.
She never went to see these things—for fear, for laziness, for absorption
in quiet, solitary work, as she reminisced about a culture she had studied one day.
Maybe in reality she never knew how to integrate herself into communities
or how to observe people with discernment and empathy.
She could not feel the vibrating unity of the universe,
much less understand people who spoke in a slurred cacophony of speech
and taught their children to go door to door dancing doggie-style
so that people would give them money
in the vicious euphoria of patriotic festivities.

V.
She found a man who sold bread
and who was very kind to her.
She found a woman who ran a little restaurant called “The Hand of God”
and who gave her all the panela water that she wanted with her lunch.
She found a woman who took power walks at six in the morning
and asked her enthusiastic questions about her life.
She found little pieces of humanity that she could thread together
loosely in her jumbled mind as she failed at meditating.
But she felt guilty that she never went out walking
just to look for the strange unity
that moved with a rhythm like breathing
between everyone and everything
in Cartagena de Indias.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Good News for the Poor, the Captive, the Blind and the Oppressed

I recently accompanied my mother to the radical little Episcopal church outside of town. They were sharing testimonies about their trip to Nicaragua, and one woman began with: "I don't want to sound evangelical, but..." I smiled to myself. How many sentences have I prefaced the same way? For years, I have gone out of my way to assure everyone around me that I had no intention to push my beliefs on them. My reluctance to do anything that might look like evangelism is understandable if you consider that Evangelical Christianity in this country is popularly associated with pushy proselytizing, hidden right-wing agendas, sexism, bigotry, and a shallow, self-righteous spirituality. 

When I arrived in Bolivia in 2010 I started to see evangelism differently. In a country where Protestantism is in the minority, evangelism is humbler, more earnest, and more generous. My Methodist friends see evangelism a gift they freely offer that people can choose to take or leave. They want to share the transcendent hope, the intentional lifestyle and the close-knit community they have found in the midst of a society torn asunder by poverty, corruption, individualism and the disorienting process of incorporation into global capitalism. Evangelism is, by definition, the proclamation of good news. If God has placed good news for their fellow humans in their hearts, why would they not proclaim it?


But of course, Christian evangelism is not just any good news. It is the Good News that Jesus Christ is God incarnate, and he lived, died and was resurrected to redeem the sins of the world and establish a new world in its place. Amen? My "amen" has often been hesitant after such a proclamation. Don't get me wrong. I love Jesus. I love his stories about mustard seeds, widows, and last-minute wedding guests. I love his austere spirituality, his solidarity with the marginalized, his fierce sense of justice, and his tender compassion. And I cannot deny that there is something transcendent and universal about the person of Jesus. I have felt his presence in my life, in my spirit, in my very body. But I struggle with the doctrine that Jesus was the unique son of God, and that he died for the universal redemption of humankind. My own fierce sense of justice cannot comprehend why God's grace would only be available through one culturally particular construct of the spiritual life. I am also suspicious of the idea that incarnation of God can be limited to only one historical male person, as if the divine were not inextricably imbedded in all of us and all of creation. To be honest, I'm just not sure what I believe about Jesus in a cosmic sense. When I talk about God, I often leave Jesus in the background.


Nonetheless, lately everything has conspired to bring me face-to-face with the good news of Jesus Christ and even to channel it through me. All summer, I was preparing to take a trip to Peru for a World Methodist Evangelism Institute seminar. The leaders commended the delegates to prepare ourselves spiritually with journaling, prayer and reflection. I wasn't sure what this preparation would look like for me, with all my uncertainty and skepticism about evangelism, but I remained open to however God might enlighten and transform me as the seminar approached.

God responded by sending me on a last-minute trip to Bolivia. 

It all started because I agreed to help fundraise for the National Methodist Youth Encounter in Bolivia, an event that I was deeply involved in the last time it happened two years ago. My mind started spinning with ways to make the encounter a more transformative experience for the youth, and I wished I could be there to implement my ideas. I started hearing from a string of Bolivian friends who had gotten their hopes up that I might be coming. I was struck by how important my presence was to them. Was it just the novelty of having the pollera-wearing gringa around, or was there really some special inspiration or spirit that I was able to share with them? I wasn’t sure, but my heart started fluttering in my ribcage with the sensation that I was on the wrong continent to carry out God’s mission for me. It seemed irresponsible to pay the exorbitant cost of a last-minute plane ticket. Nonetheless, I prayed that if I was meant to be there, God would confirm it for me. Two weeks before the encounter began, I went to bed knowing that the next day I had to buy a ticket if I was ever going to buy one. Before I fell asleep, I read the Upper Room Devotional for the day, and it just so happened to be based on this passage from 2 Corinthians 9:

You will be enriched in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion, and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God. This service that you perform is not only supplying the needs of the Lord’s people but is also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God. Because of the service by which you have proved yourselves, others will praise God for the obedience that accompanies your confession of the gospel of Christ, and for your generosity in sharing with them and with everyone else. 
If God has placed some good news in my heart, how could I not proclaim it? I bought my ticket the next day, and eleven days later, I was boarding the plane. 

The XVII National Methodist Youth Encounter brought together an upwards of 1,000 youth from all around the geographical and climactic rollercoaster that is Bolivia, representing a dizzying array of indigenous (and not-so-indigenous) cultures. They gathered from Thursday through Sunday to worship God, to participate in workshops on leadership, Christian formation, evangelism, social issues and the environment, to bond over sports tournaments, and to represent their cultures through music, dance and theatre with a Christian message. 


The encounter was, from one perspective, an organizational disaster. The coordinators confronted one problem after another: a shortage of mattresses for people to sleep on the first day, participants of questionable motivation wandering around uncertain of where and when their workshops were on Friday, and a discombobulated evangelism outing on Sunday. However, none of this prevented the Spirit from working in surprising ways. The event was still able to transform individual hearts, to create bonds of love between participants, and to expose young people to new forms of serving their communities. And all of this was possible because of the mysterious love of Christ that has both freed us and bound us together in a way that many of these youth—myself included—are just beginning to understand.

From another perspective, then, the encounter was a perfect demonstration of how the Kingdom of Heaven manifests in this world—in glimmers and glimpses, always incomplete but somehow breaking into the ordinary even in the midst of all our human failings. Certainly, the event was no dazzling success of molding the up and coming generation of Bolivian Christians into model disciples. But if it had been experienced as such, it probably wouldn't have been honest. Rather, the hope we have in Christ is precisely that God's grace will continue work through our humble, bumbling selves even though we never reach perfection. That, indeed, is good news.


So I will not try to summarize the effect of the encounter in sweeping strokes. I will not count its crowning success as the altar call at the end, or the 160-some residents of Cochabamba who gave the youth their contact information during the door-to-door evangelism activity on Sunday. I will simply offer a few examples of how I personally witnessed glimmers of the Kingdom of Heaven in the experiences we shared together.



  
My principle task at the encounter—the one I had planned, at leastwas to give workshops on Wesleyan Groups. The original Wesleyan movement encouraged converts to form small, close-knit groups that met regularly in order to encourage and challenge each other in their spiritual development. I had never even participated in a Wesleyan Group when I decided to lead the workshop. I had heard that we would be doing them at the seminar in Peru, and I immediately knew that I had to bring this idea to the Bolivian youth.  I thought these intimate groups could be an invaluable tool to help them deepen their walk with God and their sense of mission. In many church contexts, the voices of women, youth and other marginal identities are devalued, and these individuals have little chance to reflect their spiritual experiences to the community. Without such sharing, not only does the individual's self-reflective capacity suffer, but the community is all the poorer without the unique wisdom that God has placed in each member.

For me, the Wesleyan Groups were all about nurturing a Christian practice that would manifest the Kingdom of Heaven in a just, peaceful and loving community. However, I enlisted the help of a young Bolivian friend who challenged me to focus first and foremost on
the step that comes before building the Kingdom: salvation. The step that requires evangelism. The step that I’ve never really wanted to deal with. My friend Lucio, a sharp-minded young man with a charismatic approach, told me that many people in Bolivia—even among Evangelical Methodists—haven’t truly experienced or understood salvation. Being the hemming-and-hawing progressive North American that I am, I don’t even know what we Christians are being saved from. I’m not so sure about hell or original sin. But I do agree with Lucio that we do need to be saved from some source of evil, and that the renewal of our bodies soul, and spirit is possible through Jesus Christ. This notion of total transformation in Christ is exactly what makes it so powerful to sit around in small groups and answer Wesley's traditional question, “How is it with your soul?” This transformation exactly what gives people the strength and the tenderness to look at their own souls and the souls of others with God’s eyes. Otherwise, as the progressive Western world has shown us, the passion dissolves and people just resort to doing service projects and trying not to sound evangelical—if they keep believing in God at all. 

To my own surprise, I found myself taking Lucio’s advice to heart, and I presented the central purpose of the Wesleyan groups as discussing the "state of our salvation," thereby deepening our understanding of God's redemptive love for each one of us. But unlike Lucio, I do not believe that fully actualizing our salvation is a simple step-by-step process. Even as an individual struggles to understand God's what redemptive love means for her personally, she can begin participating in the radically new way of life that the Reign of God brings to society.  Sometimes, this experience itself is what leads her to a personal relationship with God. Sometimes, people who are already believers are the ones who most need evangelizing to realize the true nature of the new reign that they have been invited to enter. Mortimer Arias, former bishop of the Bolivian Methodist church, writes: "On the way to discipleship, conversion is not merely a point but a permanent process. And, strangely enough, it is the conversion of believers, not nonbelievers, that is the focal point. Evangelization also occurs inside the community of the kingdom!" (Announcing the Reign of God, 53). If the fruits of our salvation are not apparent in a reign of love, justice and peace among us, then further proclamation of the good news is still required.

I realized that part of my evangelism was showing women in the Wesleyan workshops the value of their own voice. Some of the church sisters from rural areas struggled to find the courage to speak even in our small groups. I affirmed that in Christ we all could claim the freedom and the power to share the wisdom that God had placed within each one of us. In one group, a young woman from an Aymara village said that she was studying to be a pastor, and she was slowly learning how to have a voice in public. I told her that she could pray for strength when she was afraid, and God would not only give her the courage to speak, but would give her invaluable things to speak about. Her growing confidence was one of those glimpses of the Kingdom of God that I witnessed in the encounter. On the other hand, some of the young girls in that same group almost refused to say a single word, so great was their fear or their sense of worthlessness. Yet I had to trust that the communion of the group was one way that God was at work in their hearts, and at work in whatever oppressive situations surrounded them, to gradually invite them into the full freedom Christ's good news offers. 

I also experienced in the encounter my own conversion to the power of thinking evangelically. I discovered courage, capabilities and wisdom that I did not know I possessed when I was surrounded by people who believe that the Holy Spirit will empower us in any way we need to share the Gospel. On the Saturday of the encounter, through a strange chain of events, I ended up standing in front of 1,000 people and improvising the narration of a theater piece that told the story of a young woman's dramatic conversion. It reminded me of the times I had to preach a sermon with only a couple minutes' notice in the dorm where I lived in La Paz—except this time multiplying the audience about 100-fold, and without knowing most of them personally.


It all came about because of Carlos Machado—or, if you prefer, Karl Mac, his Americanized name which will serve him well when he embarks on his calling to evangelize the spiritually chilly United States and remind them of the burning love of Christ. Karl came all the way from SĂŁo Paulo, Brazil to teach theater evangelism techniques to the Bolivian youth.  His ability to get the youth on their feet, moving, laughing, and shouting out interpretations of the freeze-frame "paintings" that they made with their own bodies, was another shimmering manifestation of the Kingdom of Heaven. The youth were discovering that creativity inside of themselves that reflects God's own creative power. 

Karl immediately took a liking to me when we met, and enlisted me to help him in his activities. He told me that he could see the Holy Spirit working in me powerfully. He said it with such conviction that I believed him, despite how unholy I feel most of the time. I had been planning to give more sessions of my Wesleyan Group workshop on Saturday, but they re-organized and consolidated the workshops at the last minute to eliminate the chaos that had run rampant on Friday. So Karl invited me to translate from Portuguese to Spanish in his workshop. Afterwards, he took a few of his most inspired students and organized a theater piece to perform that night in front of the entire assembly. He needed me to narrate, because I spoke Spanish and, apparently, the Holy Spirit was working strongly in me. I was to tell the story of a young a woman's life while pairs of actors pantomimed different moments, freezing one by one as I walked among them to construct a timeline of living "statues." Karl only gave me the bare bones of a plot to embellish, and I wasn't even sure if I agreed with the theology implicit in it. But when the moment of the performance arrived, I did feel that the Spirit filled me with fluid, authoritative speech. It went something like this:










This is the story of a young woman who was "in the world," and all that mattered to her was the momentary joys of drinking, going to parties, and hanging out with her friends.

At one of these parties, she met a man and they hit it off. They went 
around together for awhile and lived it up.












But before long, she found herself pregnant, and her boyfriend disappeared.
When her little girl was born, she had no support from her family. Her daughter 
was in frail health, and she could not even afford the medicine.



One day, as she was walking down the street, in low spirits as usual, another young woman, who happened to be a Christian, noticed her. The Christian woman's heart went out to her. She began to talk to the young woman about the grace of Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit opened up that single mother's heart to receive the message. She got on her knees and accepted Christ into her heart at that very hour.



She started attending a church, and she found the strength in Christ, 
in his teachings, and in her spiritual family, to rebuild her life. 
She began to taste true joy—not like the passing joy she had in the parties and 
with her boyfriend, but an eternal joy that can only be found in God. She felt 
complete in her relationship with God, and that she did not even need a partner. 
But then a man arrived in her life, a fellow Christian, and they 
fell in love. He accepted her daughter as his own, and they formed a family 
who walked together in the path of Christ.


To wrap it up, the actors made a half-moon around me and we sang "Renew Me Lord Christ" with my ukulele backing us up. I wasn't sure what we had just done, but it was something that put a sparkle in the eyes of all the young actors. I hoped at the very least that it had taught us something about expressing the unique story that God has placed in all of us to share with the world, whether it fits the mold of the theater piece's rather simplistic conversion story or not. And maybe the people watching also caught a sparkle in their eyes, and experienced some revelation of what it means to be authentically transformed in Christ.

By the end of the encounter, I was still unsure of what exactly the "good news" means to me.  The beliefs that God has placed in my own heart still seem to differ from accepted tradition 
 on many points. I believe in the importance of forming supportive community bonds and holding each other accountable for our spiritual growth as the Wesleyan small groups make possible, but do I believe in the "fleeing from the wrath to come" that was at the root of all this for Wesley? I believe in the power of religious conversion to give us peace and purpose in our lives, but do I really believe that all that matters for solving a single mother's problems is for her to accept Christ as her savior, as our theater piece suggested? 

But I also have to remember that evangelism is not just these theological caricatures. Evangelism isn't just proclaiming the good news, but embodying it. In this sense, evangelism is breaking bread together and remembering that everything we have is a gift from God. Evangelism is strategizing with my comadre (the mother of my goddaughter) about ways to help her out of the shackles of her poverty. Evangelism is offering healing insights to a friend who had injured his hand in a chain saw accident, and above all giving him the courage to continue with his music when I sang one of his songs with him and his folkloric Christian band, at a time when he was afraid he would never be able to play guitar again. 



These forms of evangelism are not so different from Jesus' own evangelism. When Jesus began his ministry, Luke describes him getting up in the temple and reading a scroll from Isaiah that went: "The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." It's all there. My comadre, the Aymara women who are afraid to speak, my musician friend in need of healing, the youth who acted in the drama. This is not to say they do not also need eternal salvation, beyond their present needs and desires. But perhaps it is not so easy to distinguish between the good news for this realm—the challenging, teacherly Christ who promotes social justice and practical spiritual cultivation—and the good news for the next realm—the cosmic, unfathomable hope of a Christ who conquered death and is creating a place for all humanity to dwell in eternity with God. At the very least, one without the other is meaningless. 


Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Like Every Reluctant Prophet

I gave up Facebook for Lent. I am probably not unique in this decision. I surmised as much from an offhanded reference in a recent New York Times article about a pastor using Lent to call big banks to repentance. As the pastor in the article suggested by lumping Facebook with caffeine, giving up Facebook for Lent is probably just a sign of the times for most Christians, a modernization of the standard list of soft addictions. For me, however, it is tied up in a whole web of spiritual meaning. If I had to summarize the larger issue that my abstinence from Facebook symbolizes, I would call it a "prophetic stance against endless technological progress."

In other words, giving up Facebook has everything to do with the sort of large-scale social repentance that the pastor in the article linked with boycotting Bank of America. Most people would not jump to this conclusion. My friends tend to see any spirituality-impeding or life-draining effects of technological gadgets as an individual failure of will power. They would not see it as the fault of a social atmosphere that normalizes and celebrates the use of technology to distract us from the more tactile, physically active, emotionally intimate and reflective aspects of life. And they would certainly not see it as any fault of the wondrous technology itself. But I propose that recent technological "tools" like cell phones, Facebook, iPods and iEverything (there is, after all, a program called "iLife") are real impediments to the flourishing of our souls and the growth of our spirits.

I have long complained like a cantankerous old lady about how these newfangled gadgets are taking the aesthetics out of life and distracting us from deeper relationships. But I venture to attach the word "prophetic" to my anti-technology stance because I have started to get the strange sense that God is calling me to assert it in a public and methodical way. This calling is not altogether welcome. I would much rather just keep jabbering in my rocking chair and smacking my imaginary dentures.

Over spring break, in the absence of "social networking" distractions, I have buried myself in stories about female leaders in the history of American Methodism. Many of them had dreams that called them to preach. Women living during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were considered to have little or no innate authority to preach, so such dreams were difficult to grapple with. Some had recurring dreams that they stood before great crowds at revivals. Others underwent life-threatening illnesses during which they dreamt of encountering an angel who told them that they could not die yet, for they must preach God's word to the world.

There was no denying these dreams, much as the women might have wished to do. They followed the typical pattern of Old Testament prophets who object at first to the impossibility of their commission, but eventually accept that they have no choice but to fulfill it. Sometimes God sends messengers in unpopular forms, as in the case of female preachers in the 18th and 19th centuries. At other times, the message itself is unpopular, as in the case of Jeremiah with his lonesome "one man band," singing of judgment for the sins of Israel and resignation to a long exile in Babylon. Whether the message or the medium—or both—are deemed inappropriate by worldly standards, it seems that prophets' very marginality serves as confirmation that they come from God. They are, indeed, not "of this world."

I have had my own dreams of preaching lately. In one, I was preaching in a traditional church setting for the first time. My sermon was about how modern technology was ruining our practice of Christianity. I was so nervous that I almost emerged from a backstage area without the traditional minister's vestments that I am so eager to wear someday. My mother stopped me and helped me get dressed. It felt like a cross between a big concert performance and my wedding day.

When I got to the pulpit, I immediately ruined any sense of liturgical drama by making a sheepish comment about being nervous. Then I sat down on an elevated seat behind the pulpit and folded my legs like a Buddhist lama, which I realized ruined the cool look of my vestments. But none of this mattered when I began my sermon, and everything came out clearly, concisely, and graciously. I knew exactly what I needed to say. I said that technological gadgets distract us from a more soulful engagement with life. I proclaimed the things that we are losing to technology: the tactile, focused experience of putting on albums or CDs and listening all the way through to an artist's vision, the physical process of going to the library to do research in books and print journals instead of zooming around cyberspace, the necessity of getting to know your neighbors so that you will have someone to chat with on the porch in the evening rather than chatting on Facebook, the habit of taking a walk in the nearby woods to clear your head instead of watching YouTube videos. The problem with the newest technology is precisely that it makes everything so convenient. It's so convenient to distract ourselves from those quiet moments in the day, from making a good slow-cooking meal, or better yet, growing our own slow-sprouting vegetables. We don't even have to work as hard for relationships. Who thinks anymore of putting a physical pen to paper to write their deepest feelings and quirkiest insights for a friend? And if we don't have the attention span or the devotion to make beautiful things for other people, how much less will we have to do the Beautiful for God?


To be sure, there is nothing wrong with human technology in itself—pens and papers are technology, as are pots and pans, as are domesticated crops. The human gift for inventing new ways of interacting with the world is surely God-given. But we have begun to build a new Tower of Babel with our lust for technological progress. We constantly pursue ever more perfect ways of dominating our world, and it seems we are finally succeeding: that is, we are forgetting how to move through the world as a gift from God, with humility, attentiveness and compassion. Instead, we move through the world as something that we fabricated and we control, as a set of conveniences, thrills and distractions. If we keep this up, God will have no choice but to topple the monument of technological progress that we are trying to build to the sky. We will run out of fossil fuels. We will realize we no longer have the option of causing any more destruction to the ozone layer or dumping any more pollutants in our soil and water. The freak tornados, torrential rains, droughts and tsunamis will make our iLives irrelevant as they destroy our homes, livelihoods and sources of sustenance.

That's what I preach in my dreams, more or less. But I always wake up before I finish. I don't know what the end should be, or whether it will find everyone glaring at me in disdain or weeping in repentance. Or could they even be singing praises? Will my sermon end with the hope of restoration?

One dream did portray my listeners' reactions. I was telling a group of people a story about a city boy's deep longing for the forest. I was describing his one glorious day of union with nature when he visited a female cousin in the country. And some of the people gathered around me were indeed weeping. As I told the story, I realized that I was telling the story of all the people in that room. A story about a forest we all longed for, but couldn't quite make it back to. We were, in fact, sitting in the bedroom of the house where I used to live in the middle of the forest in Oakland County. I explained that when the boy visited his cousin here, it was different—the house was like a part of the forest, an extension of it. Now, the windows had high-tech shades and we were sealed off from it. Our technology had become not a part of our communion with God's creation, but a way of insulating ourselves from it. Before I could actually begin describing the boy's adventure in the forest, everyone had fallen asleep.

I do not have to worry as much as earlier Methodist women about being seen as an acceptable messenger. Yet I certainly worry that the content of my message will seem altogether inappropriate to modern society. And if I come bearing an unpopular message, the questionable status of a female messenger is automatically reactivated. I run the risk of confirming that women are linked with irrationality, nature worship, and retrogressive attitudes. Which does not help to promote the idea that all humans, both women and men, need more imaginative, non-rational discourse, more closeness to nature, and a greater appreciation of traditional ways of life. Nonetheless, if indeed I am commissioned with a message—and Lord knows that dreams are the best way to get my attention!—I must speak it regardless of how people receive it. As I've sung in one of my favorite hymns from Bolivia, the Song of Jeremiah,

"Tengo que gritar / Tengo que arriesgar / Ay de mi si no lo hago!"
("I have to shout / I have to risk myself / Woe unto me if I do not!")

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

I Never Will Marry

I have for some time now been obsessed with the institution of marriage. Anyone who has heard my concept album The Color Suite and read the accompanying chapbook of poems and stories likely came away with with their head spinning from all the images of golden rings lost and found, husbands and wives in delicate dances, marital bliss eclipsed by marital darkness. I have found multivalent uses for the marriage metaphor in my quest to heal the masculine and feminine archetypes within myself, and to deepen my relationship with God. Nonetheless, I have also been quite preoccuppied with literal, everyday marriages: how they work, how they fail, and whether or not I might ever have the opportunity to make a go at one. Regardless of my rapidly shifting expectations and conceptions about marraige, I never doubted that the institution of marriage would play a central role in my life.

Until about a month ago. I can't remember when or why exactly the thought came over me, but suddenly I started saying to myself: "Maybe I don't want to get married after all." In my personal psycho-symbolic world, this is something akin to blasphemy. Which is perhaps why it was such a delicious thought to have.

And this isn't like my past phases of "giving up" on my romantic career in a fit of melancholy—of deciding to become a nun so that at least I don't come across as some kind of lonely failure at the age of 50. No, this time I really think I might rather not get married. After all, I have a lot of other things to do: move to Bolivia as a missionary, do comparative anthropological fieldwork on immigration in Brazil and the U.S., write a practical guidebook on spiritual disciplines and social change, give workshops about sexual morality from a non-heteronormative non-repressive perspective, become fluent in at least three more languages, and develop a new musical genre based on on Andean Folkloric music and Motown Soul.

Aside from not knowing how I'll fit conjugal life into my rather busy schedule for the next 40 years, I have started to wonder if my mythological desire to get married is not altogether shaped by that age-old trope of a woman defining herself by her relationship with a man. I certainly wouldn't be the first to observe that our culture encourages women to define themselves by relationships, and men to define themselves by worldly achievements. If such a strict binary can even be drawn between these two aspects of life. But I don't think there's anything wrong with defining yourself by your relationships; humans are naturally relational creatures. The problem is defining yourself primarily by just one relationship, and expecting that to fulfill the majority of your relational needs. It has, of course, previously occurred to me that it might not be the healthiest thing to define myself primarily by one other person. But sometime in mid-January the idea started to creep from my head down into my heart. I could actually imagine feeling happier if I spread my energy between friends, colleagues and the people I serve without having to reserve a big chunk of it for a spousal unit.

Just days afters this feeling started creeping into my heart, I stumbled across this article by Kate Bolick that seemed to confirm all my suspicions about the relative superfluousness of marriage. The premise of her article sounded like some fem-journalism fluff to me: the fact that educated female professionals now significantly outnumber educated male professionals, leaving a severe shortage of suitable mates for the modern cosmopolitan woman. Which I could care less about, because I would marry the garbage truck driver if he maintained a sincere spiritual practice, acted out of sound social justice convictions, and knew how to dance the night away. But as I read further about the rising phenomenon of the "single lady," I realized Bolick was in fact challenging modern notions about marriage itself. For example, she points out that

the complexities of modern life, and the fragility of the institution of marriage, have inspired an unprecedented glorification of coupling... This marriage myth—“matrimania,” DePaulo calls it—proclaims that the only route to happiness is finding and keeping one all-purpose, all-important partner who can meet our every emotional and social need. Those who don’t have this are pitied. Those who don’t want it are seen as threatening. Singlism, therefore, “serves to maintain cultural beliefs about marriage by derogating those whose lives challenge those beliefs.”
Apparently, before the 19th century, when marriage was more about consolidating property and wealth than finding an ideal mate to fulfill all your needs, people focused more on neighbors, friends and other family members for their emotional needs. Same-sex friendships often took on the same sort of intensity we normally reserve for "significant others." As the marriage bond became increasingly romanticized, people neglected these other social bonds to focus on the spousal relationship. Yet overall happiness seems to be greater when one maintains a flexible, diverse social network. What if, for example, I could be just as happy calling up my friend Louis when I need a massage, or making Valentine's Day cards for my friend Amy when I wanted to express my uniquely romantic vision of the world to someone who will understand?

So, with a sincere Valentine's Day spirit, I have decided to share my adaptation of an old traditional. I wrote new verses to update the hopelessly disempowering tale of a woman who threw herself into the sea to avoid having to marry anyone else after her fiancĂ© died. I feel that I have much better—and more romantic—reasons why I (Maybe) Never Will Marry.


I never will marry
I'll be no man's wife
I intend to live single
All the days of my life

I've got a good friend
She loves me more than a man could
And we write love letters
To all the creatures in the woods
They say, "Do not fear friends
We've got our ears to your hearts
We won't leave you lonely
Till death do us part"

(Chorus)

This grove of deep shadows
Will be my own bed
I've learned to grow cabbages
I can sell by the head
I must paint flowers
And hold church for the squirrels
My tasks here are many
And my time is short in this world

(Chorus)

I'll cast my fair body
Into the hot thick of life
I'll get my hands dirty
But I'll be no man's wife

Friday, January 13, 2012

The World Turned Inside Out

Upon returning to Candler, I dreamt that the entire area had been colonized by aliens. The invaders were brutally oppressive. They replaced all the familiar things—the elegant white buildings and tree-lined streets of Southern suburbia—with a metallic, boxy city. We were rigidly controlled through violence and terror tactics. We knew we would be killed in cold blood if we stepped out of line.

We had been on a roll. We had been in the middle of our seminary education, developing big dreams and sharp minds for transforming the world, but we had to let all our half-finished work go now, with no knowledge of whether we would get to take it back up again. Now we lived by a strict daily regimen in a barracks and worked as conscripted labor in factories. Data factories. Doing manual labor of the mind.

Our only source of release was at the carnivals that they had built for us. We were permitted to go out on certain evenings and ride the Ferris wheels or those swinging arms that turn you upside down or the Tilt-A-Whirl, until we spun out into oblivion. I was surprised that they were generous enough to provide the carnivals, but it also made me wonder if our imprisonment was just as much through subtler manipulations as it was through direct force. Their idea, perhaps, was to take up our only free time with mind-numbing entertainment.

We were shuffling through the hallways on our way to lunch one day when I witnessed an infrequent spontaneous exchange between two of my friends. M., a deeply spiritual, gay black man asked N., a sugary-feminine conservative white girl, how she was doing.

"I wish you wouldn't ask me that," N. responded with her usual sing-songy cheer. "You know they don't let us speak our own mind in this hell-hole. Everything is controlled. I would get in trouble for being honest."

How did she get away with being so honest about not being able to be honest? Weren't they watching on cameras? Was she deliberately pushing the limits to see what she could get away with?

Maybe this is what gave me the courage to carry out my escape plan. My pregnant wife had managed to flee in the midst of the takeover, and I knew that she was living now in the house of a beloved professor couple who had always invited students over for creative dinner parties and stimulating dialogue. They had been killed in the conquest, but their house remained a haven of sorts, tucked deep in the forest, up in the hills, across the river from the alien city. I somehow knew she was hiding there, and I decided to try to reunite with her.

I slipped away as everyone else was heading out to the carnival. It was strangely easy. I made my way across the river and through the jungle-like forest until I reached the house. With each step deeper into the forest I breathed with relief. High above the river, I looked back and could see the alien city, its boxy metal buildings interspersed with patches of flashy, multicolored carnival rides. They looked beautiful, tragic and menacing all at once.

When I got to the professors' house, I found my wife and my two-year-old child there. I was not a man, but I had a wife who was such a part of my soul that she bore me a child. She greeted me with innocent bravery and the long, soft brown hair of a princess. She had kept the light in me alive out in the wilderness. My little boy was as beautiful as my articulate, Hallelujah-singing nephew with his deep dimples and his perfect arching eyebrows. Maybe from here we could escape to a different part of the world and live free.




I woke up the next morning to another day of class in carpeted, windowless rooms with roller chairs and straight rows of polyurethane tables that face towards a sleek, digitally-equipped podium. Our Methodist History professor, amidst the barrage of names, dates and institutional church decisions, discussed the curious case of a certain Bishop James O. Andrew and an enslaved woman named Catherine "Kitty" Boyd.

As tensions about slavery were building in the US in the mid-nineteenth century, northern Methodists took Bishop Andrew to ecclesiastical trial for his slave ownership, in an attempt to assert anti-slavery values as the norm of the church. The way Professor D. explained it to us, Bishop Andrew had inherited a slave named Kitty from his late wife. Professor D. painted the Bishop as ever the reluctant slave owner, caught between Georgia law (which would not let him free slaves), Kitty's own wishes (which were not to be sent off to Liberia through the American Colonization Society), and the insistence of northern church representatives that his slave ownership delegitimized his position as Bishop. Though Bishop Andrew was supposedly prepared to resign, the trial caused the split of the Methodists into two churches, North and South. The American Civil War ensued. As for Miss Kitty, the story goes that Bishop Andrew built her a nice little cabin on his property in Oxford, Georgia and allowed her to marry, raise children, and live the rest of her days "as in freedom."

Professor D. admitted that one scholar had made a convincing argument that Bishop Andrew had a "sexual relationship" with Miss Kitty. In my subsequent internet sleuthing, I found that Mark Auslander's work reveals a contradictory story to the one our professor decided to tell us. Auslander researched the way present-day blacks and whites in the town of Oxford recall and enact their mythology about Bishop Andrew, Miss Kitty, and the institution of slavery itself. He found that the whites of the town had co-opted all the physical memorials to Miss Kitty. They lead historical re-enactment tours of her cottage that imagine Kitty as the pinnacle of old-fashioned domesticity and maternal neighborliness. They care for her memorial in the Andrew family plot of the cemetery, as she was given the "honor" of being the only black person buried in the white section. In essence, whites uphold the story of Kitty's benevolent treatment and loyalty to her master as a way to weave "a deeply nostalgic narrative of tranquil antebellum race relations." Meanwhile, African-American residents of Oxford wince as they drive by "Kitty's Cottage," remembering Kitty as the coerced lover of Bishop Andrew, who had three children by her that he refused to recognize. They consider her to have been denied the basic elements of freedom throughout her life. They do not see race relations that allow one human being to legally own another as tranquil or benevolent. From a precursory skim of Auslander's website, I discovered that Bishop Andrew in fact owned many other slaves acquired from different sources, seriously calling into question the "accidental" nature of his slaveholding status. Why didn't Professor D. mention any of this in class?

Because maybe that would be a little too much critical thinking for the gray-green carpet to absorb. Maybe it's no coincidence that Oxford, Georgia was the original seat of Emory University, and Bishop James O. Andrew served as the first chairman of its Board of Trustees. Nor a coincidence that I had a dream about being enslaved by aliens at Emory the morning prior to learning about Bishop Andrew's sordid little "accident." Emory likes to market its academics as being on the cutting edge of progressive thought. And I know it has its enclaves. But on a whole it is just like any other university system: pitting you against hierarchical, alienating pedagogical models based on a competitive capitalist meritocracy, which reward conformity and maintenance of the status quo, as long as you innovate just enough to make it seem like you are doing something good for society. In this context, we spend much of our time absorbing and regurgitating information in efficient, boxy classrooms while our professors bring in carnival sideshows of YouTube videos and pop culture references to keep us entertained and appeased. It is a modern-day, white-collar form of slavery that sustains and is sustained by the slave labor of lower class jobs in this country and across the globe. Because we are too busy at the data factory and the YouTube carnival to notice that there is a forest within all of us waiting to be born.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Between Two Cities


Lately I have been thinking a lot about duality. We Christians traditionally believe in another realm beyond the one we can see, touch and taste, and that this is where our true home lies. That we are just pilgrims in the world of sensory experience. Augustine, that ardent and tormented saint whose sexuality was a perennial barrier to his communion with God, calls these two realities the City of God and the City of Man. In mainstream America, Augustine's dualistic assessment of humankind is unpopular. Even many Christians, not to mention the agnostics, atheists, Buddhist practitioners and "spiritual-but-not-religious," cringe upon reading:
I classify the human race into two branches: the one consists of those who live by human standards, the other of those who live according to God's will.... By two cities I mean to say two societies of human beings, one of which is predestined to reign with God for all eternity, the other doomed to undergo eternal punishment with the Devil (Ch 5.1).

Many would ask: How can it be fair to separate the human race into two branches, when we are all such a mix of good and evil? When those who do evil have so often been wounded by circumstance? When the very definition of "evil" is relative? When some "evils" seem predicated on maintaining control over others, and some "evils" deny the pleasures our bodies and hearts were designed to experience? Some might insist that they would rather live in the City of Humans if the City of God thunders with such judgment.


But if we examine the qualities that Augustine assigns to the two realms, we might appreciate the freight behind his severe eschatological pronouncement. Some of Augustine's descriptions of the earthly city sound just like fashionable social justice advocates of today: "Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale?" (Ch. 4.4). He asserts that those rulers who belong to the heavenly kingdom, in contrast, "are not inflated with pride, but remember that they are but men...more than their earthly kingdom, they love that realm where they do not fear to share the kingship...they grant pardon not to allow impunity to wrong-doing but in hope of amendment of the wrong-doer" (Ch. 5.24). The point is that we must orient ourselves toward a transcendent standard of justice and goodness, rather than letting our own perceptions, desires and goals—short-sighted and destructive as they inevitably will be—guide our lives. Yes, humans often achieve some measure of concrete beauty and fulfillment through their "love of self." Yet Augustine reminds us that even in the in the "grandeur of empire... The only joy to be attained had the fragile brilliance of glass, a joy outweighed by the fear that it may be shattered in a moment" (Ch. 4.3). The Buddhist initiates on their meditation cushions, trying to understand what it means to detach from desire and be present to the moment, could relate.

Augustine recognizes that we cannot hope to distinguish between the two cities during this life; they are inextricably mingled. But I have to wonder, with my much more ambiguous beliefs about salvation and eternity, whether these two realms are also inextricably mixed within each individual. Can the macrocosm contain what the microcosm does not? Perhaps those who seem most damned to perish in the City of Humans are really just pieces of those who seem most heavenly. Then not a single one of us could be excluded from building the City of God; we all depend on each other to realize salvation, whether we are weak or steadfast, pious or reckless.

At an evening church service in the gritty heart of Atlanta, down the street from an outreach center for the homeless, I sit down next to a tall, willow-thin man who just got out of jail three days ago. It is his first time at the church, but he somehow ends up serving communion. For all I could tell, he inadvertently volunteered himself by rushing so eagerly up front after the officiant invited everyone to the table. A five-year-old girl in a wheelchair who also has willow-thin limbs serves me the bread, and the ex-convict serves me the wine. They both blurt out their lines awkwardly—"The body of Christ," "The cup of salvation,"—as if they are not quite sure what they mean. But are any of us sure? After all, communion is by definition a Holy Mystery.

At a sleepy bar on a weeknight in the hipster district of Little Five Points, I watch a girl dance across the empty floor in spandex and sneakers. She moves to the DJ's funk music with striking elegance. Her head is turned down and her shaggy hair hangs in her eyes as her body slithers like a snake and spins effortlessly. She is not trying to impress anyone around her. She seems rather to be dancing for someone invisible and intangible hovering above her. She might be high on drugs. Then, drugs have always been a way people seek transcendent truth, albeit a blind and destructive one as typically used today, outside the containers of ritual and tradition. Whether she realizes it or not, she is trying to dwell in the City of God.

These stories from an everyday city reflect my ambiguous relationship to the two cosmic Cities. I struggle to discern what truly constitutes a spiritual path, and how to know if I am on it. My bouts of apathetic depression, during which I am prone to forget God entirely, sometimes lead me back to humble reliance on the sustenance of spiritual community. Conversely, my proclaimed passion for doing the work of the Lord tends to get tangled up with my childish drive for affirmation from others. I find myself, as ever, caught in the margins. Which city do I live in? Do I have to chose?

I climbed under my covers one night and prayed for God to illuminate the meaning of the two cities in my life. What I got was a story about a karaoke bar and a church service. I was attending an epic talent show and fundraiser at a church. I was laden with a sense of responsibility for the event, though my role seemed to be nothing more than walking around from person to person and looking busy. My extended family was all there, and lots of shiny-faced church members.

But I really wanted to be in a bar across from the church where a good friend of mine was hosting karaoke. He was a dedicated Christian who greatly outpaced me in his passion to serve the marginalized; he was also a prolific smoker, drinker, reveler and self-absorbed navel-gazer. I had decided that I was in love with him. I was willing to stay up scandalously late so that I could go over to his karaoke night after the church event ended. He had said he wanted my support. And I wanted to impress him with my own self-absorbed charms as I belted out smoky Aretha Franklin songs.

The church event dragged on as if it were its own revelrous party. As 2:00 AM came and went, I was texting back and forth with my friend—texting on a cell phone! A sure sign that I had let go of all my moral principles!—and apologizing that I wasn't there yet. Could I stay up until 3:00? 3:30? Would this be a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit? The talent show finally finished and I hurried across the courtyard outside. Inside the bar, they were already taking down the speakers and the rest of the karaoke equipment. My friend was nowhere in sight. But what kind of bar was this? It had pews and a big stage just like in a church. My family members and shiny-faced church members were there as well. Balding men in polo shirts were carrying the sound system and smiling their fatherly Christian smiles. Even the smallest children didn't seem worried about going to sleep at an ungodly hour.

"Where did the karaoke host go?" I asked someone.

"Oh, he hasn't left yet," they assured me. "He's just changing in the bedrooms."

The bedrooms, of course. I lived in this bar with my family. We slept in the bedrooms in back. Somehow it had become impossible to separate wholesome havens of family values from seedy karaoke bars, or to disentangle working like a bee in the Body of Christ from falling in love with charismatic bastards. The darkness around us is thick and rich, and we may have to learn to make something out of it rather than trying to float above it. We are just pilgrims here, but we are also trying to come on up to the house. We are trying to make a real home for ourselves out of our fragmented insights into the heavenly city. If we do not practice home-making in this life, how will we recognize our home in the next?