Tag: Flannery O’Connor

Categories
Belief Finding Gnostics God Mental Health Seeking, Finding

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

John David:

I’m going to start with the easy stuff before it all falls apart.

These are 10 important books to me:

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I think her exploration of power, and its intersection with personal animus, is thrilling. Will she ever finish the trilogy? She is my generation’s George R.R. Martin. (I also appreciate her portrait of Henry, who too often is a caricature of a horny monster. Antonia Fraiser, who has written a lot about Henry and his wives, made the great point that while we know Henry is going to marry six women — and kill two of them — Henry doesn’t know this about himself. Each marriage was the answer in his head.)

Independent People by Haldor Laxness. It’s grim, and Icelandic, and is so achingly human about despair and disappointment. Zach recommended it to me when I was looking for non-English novels to assign to my group.

The Makioka Sisters by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki. Painfully, achingly human and blackly funny. It’s a grim Jane Austen novel with more diarrhea. It’s set in Japan right before World War II, and explores modernity in a country on the brink of being decimated by atomic bombs.

Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas. He’s looking at 15h and 16th systems of magic, and then how that is incorporated into traditional religious belief. Thomas doesn’t question people’s vocation. If someone identified as a necromancer, he calls them a necromancer and then doesn’t feel the need to whisper to us in the next sentence, “Of course necromancers do not exist.” He trusts his readers enough. I read a book about Madame Blavatsky and the guy writing it was so mean about her weight, and personal appearance, and sneered at everything Blavatsky did. I am not attempting, in a list of beloved books, to rehabilitate the life and career of Blavatsky. But I don’t need that guy in my ear being a jerk.

The Complete Flannery O’Connor by Flannery O’Connor. Her religious world view is singular and fierce and very Old Testament. (A mentally handicapped boy is drowned in a pond as a kind of baptism and that’s considered a happy ending for that kid.) My personal bible is engraved with this quote from O’Connor: “Grace changes us and the change is painful.”

The Complete Gerard Manley Hopkins by Gerard Manley Hopkins. His descriptions of nature — “skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow”, “my heart in hiding stirred for a bird”, “Goldengrove unleaving” — feel essential to me. My friend Steve gets so mad about Hopkins seemingly giving up his poetry for his life as a Jesuit, so anytime we talk about Hopkins, we talk about that. But I’d rather discuss the poems.

Dickens: A Biography by Peter Ackroyd. It is as long as two Dickens novel, and there are several sections where Ackroyd imagines conversations with Dickens and his comrades that can get a little smurfy. But for someone like me, with a fascination with the 19th century (my lectures tend to focus on Victorian society, culture, literature, morality), it’s such a densely rich package of information. And you can’t understand England in the 19th century without understanding Dickens.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. About 20 years ago, I picked up a copy of The Woman in White at a used bookstore and was hooked from the opening line. (“This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.”) After finishing it (oh! One of my favorite reading moments in my life is being on the Metro to work and reading a scene in the novel where you find out that someone wicked has read someone else’s diary and how that is revealed was so shocking to me that I honestly gasped and put the book down and the woman sitting next to me asked if I was okay. “No, I am not,” I said. “Something scandalous happened in my book”) I wanted to learn more about Wilkie Collins, a man I’d never heard of until that moment. So I got a bio of him and that’s when I started to unravel a lot of bad, received wisdom about the 19th century. The Victorians are used as a strawman for prudery and repression, but reading the lived lives of those 19th century denizens really solidified my belief in Performed Morality (what we profess publicly so others will think we’re good) and Actual Morality (what we do in the shadows), and that we in the 21st century are not much different from our Victorian cousins except we dress for comfort and don’t die from cholera as often.

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The first chapter book I remember falling in love with. I’ve read it countless times. I think it’s what defines me as a reader. When I taught it several years ago (I keep using the word “teach” and it occurs to me that I need to clear some stuff up and I’ll do that after this list), and really thought about the book and my relationship to it, I was surprised to realize that when I read it as a boy in, what? The 1980s? I had no idea it was an Old Book. Alice dressed differently than I did in the illustrations, but there was no sense that we were separated by 100 or so years.

Life of the Beloved by Henri Nouwen. It’s a spiritual book that didn’t make me feel cringey while reading it.

Now. More About Mike.

I am a college drop-out. I never finished. I tried, but I was both Too Poor and Too Mentally Ill in my late teens and early 20s. What I know, I know from self-teaching and listening to people smarter than I am. My day job is in financial regulatory compliance (I explain laws and regulations to people in the debt industry to make sure they’re on the right side of consumer law in their acts and practices), and I’ve cobbled together a side-gig as a teacher for adult continuing education. I didn’t want to leave you with the impression that I am something — a college graduate or some other sort of papered smart person — that I am not.

Now, to our Darker Purpose. I want to start by saying that I am about five steps behind you in all of this. I think you are incredibly well-educated in the language of rhetoric and philosophy, and I’m just very handsome and Trying My Best. This isn’t me asserting false modesty, or looking for some affirmations in return. I just want to be honest about where I am able to meet you w/r/t this conversation.

1) “we’re probably approaching the question of religion with two completely different paradigmatic approaches – mine seems to be more coldly philosophical, and yours seems more intent on finding meaning and happiness.”

I think, embarrassingly, this could also be described as, “You, John David, have given this all much more thought than I have; I’m just making my way through by feeling.” Because I don’t feel the pressing need to proselytize or convert, I also don’t feel the need to defend my faith from anything other than gross simplifications and lazy talking points. (This is ironic, of course, because I just got finished suggesting that I am a lazy, unthinking believer. We’ll just have to embrace this mystery!)

I approach religion as something I want to live with (and you will say, “No, I get it, but why?”), and you approach it as something you want to make sense of. You bring up Kierkegaard at some point and I raised both hands above my head in the universal sign for “this child needs help” and Zach kind of explained it to me, but I guess what I’m saying is, “Meet your new best friend Mike Bevel who takes Leaps of Faith all the time!”

2) “if you’ll grant me the liberty, I wanted to ask some deep and probing questions about what you said in your last e-mail. As I hope you know, absolutely nothing has the purpose of offending you. I’ve been really delighted to share in this correspondence with someone so kind and thoughtful, so I’m genuinely interesting in learning something about how you might approach these questions other than what you might consider to be my cool, objective, distant approach.”

I have only been delighted with every interaction we’ve had, and at no point do I feel you’ve been offensive. You can ask, and argue, and push back, and even express frustration. You are at 100% trust right now.

3) “I’m assuming that you’ve heard the saying that ‘anecdotes do not constitute data.'”

I didn’t list this with the other books (I don’t think the whole book is as strong as its thesis), but have you read Wendy Kaminer’s Sleeping with Extraterrestrials? She argues that, somewhere along the way, this deformed sense of propriety infected discourse and we have stopped asking follow-up questions to extraordinary claims. If someone says “I was taken aboard an alien spacecraft” or “Jesus appeared in my room last night” we (the universal “we”) worry that we’re rude if we say, “I don’t know if I believe that.” Kaminer wants us to ask more questions.

4) “What about your mystical experiences, if anything, led to you in the direction of a different conclusion – keeping in mind of course, that when someone tells you they were abducted by aliens, you would be likely to question their sanity, not engage them in rational discussion…”

Because I wanted it to be God. I think that’s probably a frustrating answer. I’m not using rationalism — and I think you are much more developed along that line. Because it felt like what I had always imagined God would feel like. (Have you seen Russian Doll on Netflix? One character attempts to bring up morality as a cause for the time loop they’re in, and another says, “The universe is moral and just happens to have your ideas about morality?”) But there isn’t anything rational about the experience.

Language fails me a little when we get here. I don’t believe that God is a person. I don’t believe that there is a place we go after this life that matches the artistic ideals of Heaven. I think God wants us to live this life here, and live it as well as we can, doing as little harm to those around us and trying as much as we can to love everyone, or at least to respect the belovedness in them. I don’t believe in miracles. I don’t believe intercessory prayer works. I think there’s a force in the universe that is good, and I want to align myself with that goodness in the universe.

(But man would I love an afterlife. It’s my narcissism. I think that I am so important that of course I should continue to live, just as I am, for all of eternity. I know it’s not true, but I want it to be true.)

5) “You said in your last email that the connection ‘with what I’ve decided to experience as God … has encouraged me to continue as a believer. Specifically, I’d like to ask this. What about that experience led you to believe that it was God?”

This is question 4 again, and I remain just as unable to describe it to you. I always get anxious in these situations because I don’t want to give the impression that my not being able to answer it means that it’s unanswerable. (It might very well be unanswerable.) It just means I am not yet smart enough to explain it. (And I may reach a point where I am smart enough and then the answer will be, “Oh, you did all this for nothing.”) And maybe that’s why faith is: the belief that you’ll eventually be able to explain the unexplainable.

“But why do you love carrot cake so much?” you could also ask, and I could only answer, “Because it tastes incredibly delicious and I am not a monster.” Why do I think it was God? Because it checked all my boxes for what God would feel like. The experience felt large and ineffable, but also suffused with love. I’d never experienced it before.

I’ll show a chink in my Armor of Faith: There are times where, especially when I dip into a depressive state, and I don’t feel that experience of God, where I begin to doubt, well, a lot of things. I doubt God. I doubt myself as a believer. I doubt the experience itself. I don’t know if I’ll ever live a comprehensive life of untroubled belief. That doesn’t worry me.

6) “If it was really a God, why doesn’t It/He/She want everyone to know that It exists, and why does It so readily reveal itself to some people and hide itself from others?”

I have two answers for this.

Mike Bevel: Christian — God reveals himself* to everyone, all the time, and is always talking to us and making himself known. We just don’t listen. God is love, and that gets in the way of our selfishness. There was a parody ad Y E A R S ago, with a woman on screen, showing a face of distress, with an anvil on her head. She says to the camera, “The pressure is unbearable. I feel it here, and here, and here. I struggle with how to deal with this pain.” And an off-camera voice says, “Have you ever thought about taking the anvil off your head?” And she says, “No, I hadn’t. But I’m willing to try anything.” There’s a screen-wipe to show the passing of time, and the woman is back on screen, this time looking calm and happy, and with no anvil on her head. She says, “It’s gone. The pressure’s gone. The agonizing pain. All of it. Gone.” And the off-camera voice says, “Would you try taking the anvil off your head again?” And she says, hopefully, “Yes! Yes I would take the anvil off my head.” It’s a parable, John David.

[* I am not great at un-gendering my language around God. I don’t believe that God has a gender of any kind; but I think of him in male terms because that’s what I grew up believing and hearing. It’s not great.]

Mike Bevel: Doubting Thomas — Yeah. I don’t know. That’s a good question. God is a Chatty Cathy throughout so much of the Old Testament*, and now we seem to have more silence than anything. It can feel devastating.

[* I am a Baptist. But I have a LOT of affinity for the Gnostics. And I’m more Marcion in my reading of the Bible than not.]

7) “You’ve said something that I’m afraid not many Christians are willing to admit: ‘I believe God exists not for any tangible reason.’ Is there any other arena of decision-making or thought aside from the spiritual/theological where this assertion would not be scoffed at?”

I guess I’d ask back how do you handle personal preferences in your worldview? Because that seems to be an irrational exception rationalists make. Here, for instance, is a list of foods I hate:

  • Cantaloupe
  • Eggplant
  • Celery
  • Cooked Celery
  • Cooked Carrots
  • Hominy
  • Green Peppers
  • Any Cooked Peppers
  • Chocolate
  • Unidentifiable Chunks of Things That Cause the Texture of a Dish to be Upsetting

8) “Your assertion that ‘I believe evolution is wrong not for any tangible reason’ is going to be met with utter bewilderment by scientists.”

I was VERY worried that at some point I expressed some creationist sympathies. I think you’re making a hypothetical point here. And I just want to go on the record to you, friend to friend: I 100% believe in evolution.

But.

I don’t understand at all how it works. I accept it on faith. I accept that smarter people than I am have a handle on it. I think we’re refining our ideas about it all the time because our science gets better and better. (We can’t really say that about religion, though, can we? Religion more often than not wants to firmly entrench itself in dogmatism and doesn’t take kindly to, “Well, here’s some new information you may want to incorporate.”)

I sometimes find myself deeply depressed and embarrassed that so much of how the world works is as much an article of faith for me as my belief in religion. I am not saying that religion and science themselves are two sides of the same coin; I’m just saying that in my thieves’ pouch, they are. (I will watch the fuck out of a science documentary, btw.)

9) “I think you have said perhaps one thing that is incorrect, and I want to see what you have to say in response. You said, ‘I’m making choices toward belief because my years of disbelief left me sad and depressed and empty.’ I’m certainly glad that you’re no longer experiencing those emotions anymore. However, in the very sentence before that, you said ‘God may or may not exist.’ Do you think that your psychological state was so vastly improved by the existence of something you haven’t even convinced yourself of? If you’d had said ‘God exists, I know him, and I can feel him,’ then I would be much more convinced of that feeling being responsible for your (what I hope is now non-existent) sadness and depression. However, how can that sadness and depression be conclusively gone if you haven’t even fully convinced yourself that the cause of your happiness even exists?”

This is a complicated question. They’re all complicated, actually, as far as I am concerned. But this one. Whoo-boy.

I am mentally ill. I am mentally ill and treated, right now, and it’s going great, thank you for asking. I am prone to:

  • Depression
  • Anxiety
  • Intrusive violent thoughts
  • Obsessive-compulsive ideation

Some of that might be genetic. Some of it might be nurture. (My childhood Wasn’t Great.) And it’s so easy (whether it’s correct or not) to write off my experiences as “Ohhhhhh. [makes spiral gesture around ear] Got it.” God didn’t take any of that away — that was all Western medicine and talk therapy. (Psychiatry, by the way. I mean, talk about taking things on faith. “Let’s just see what happens when this medication originally developed for avian diabetes gets into your brain” is as nutty as any religious belief.)

When I say that God may or may not exist, I think what I’m trying to do is provide a space for the other person to feel safe in their disbelief. I don’t want to convert someone through conversation. So, I believe God exists, but I am not troubled at all being fully in communion (heh) with someone who doesn’t believe in God at all. Like, for instance, Zach. He’s an atheistic Buddhist. He does not share any of my religious beliefs. I love that guy so fucking much.

My sadness and depression may never truly be gone, because I may just not have a brain that makes the typical amount of whatever, we’ve established I’m no scientist. But what I’m getting better at, both with my belief in God, and just through trusting myself, is not blaming myself for my feelings. That’s a fun game I run: Oh, I am sad, must be because I did something super shitty and this is the way the world works. Why I’m not a Calvinist I don’t know. If I ever start talking like a Calvinist, that should be your cue that I’m on the road to Self Harm.

John David: I love these emails with you so much. Thank you for your kindness, patience, curiosity, and deep intelligence. This continues to be such a pleasure. I’m so glad we met.

Categories
Baptist Belief Finding God New Testament Old Testament Seeking

Universal Salvation, Universal Love

I asked my pastor last night, an amazing woman named Jill McCrory of Twinbrook Baptist, what her most radical belief was w/r/t God and the Bible. She said, “Universal Salvation. We’re all saved. All of us.”

I said something similar a couple of days ago — that I don’t believe in sin, or I don’t believe in sin used as a weight against which we’re measured. And I wanted to write a bit more about that, because so often I better understand my own thinking when I’m ironing it out in print. So.

* * * * *

We are all saved. We were actually born already saved. All of us. Even the worst person you can imagine. Even that worst person. (Where I’m still working is: how necessary was Christ’s crucifixion? Is that the mechanism of salvation? Or can I rely fully on the idea of a loving God not hating any of his creation so much that he would send them to a place of permanent and utter torment? I mean, as I’m further and further into this parenthetical, I think I’m leaning more towards the “Loving God” side of the equation over the “Christ Died for Me” version.)

M.-Scott-Peck

Sin isn’t something God keeps an account of; it’s something we commit against ourselves and each other. In M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie, he shares a shattering anecdote about a patient he was treating in private practice.

“What did you get for Christmas?”

“Nothing much.”

“Your parents must have given you something. What did they give you?”

“A gun.”

“A gun?” I repeated stupidly.

“Yes.”

“What kind of gun?”

“A twenty-two.”

“A twenty-two pistol?”

“No, a twenty-two rifle.”

There was a moment of silence. I felt as if I had lost my bearings. I wanted to stop the interview. I wanted to go home. Finally I pushed myself to say what had to be said. “I understand that it was with a twenty-two rifle that your brother killed himself.”

“Yes.”

“Was that what you asked for for Christmas?”

“No.”

“What did you ask for?”

“A tennis racket.”

“But you got the gun instead?”

“Yes.”

“How did you feel, getting the same kind of gun that your brother had?”

“It wasn’t the same kind of gun.”

I began to feel better. Maybe I was just confused. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought they were the same kind of gun.”

“It wasn’t the same kind of gun,” Bobby replied. “It was the gun.”

“The gun?”

“Yes.”

“You mean it was your brother’s gun?” I wanted to go home very badly now.

“Yes.”

“You mean your parents gave you your brother’s gun for Christmas, the one he shot himself with?”

“Yes.”

* * * * *

hyperliteratura-flannery-o-connor-headerSin and evil are human creations. They break our spirit, break our heart, break our will  — but they do not deny us any of the love of God. My belief is, God is utterly incomprehensible except for two things: he only wants to give love, and he only wants to receive love in return. I think, when we meet God in Heaven, wherever Heaven happens to be, some of us are going to be overjoyed, and some of us are going to be embarrassed or even hurt a little, at first, that people whom we were awful to, because we thought we were better Christians than they were, or better people than they were, are there, in God’s glory. We’re all a little like Mrs Turpin in Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “Revelation”:

At last she lifted her head. There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were tumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who , like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They, alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was.

Ruby Turpin’s revelation is what Hell is, but it’s not forever. It lasts as long as we fight against loving everyone, against lovingkindness. So, Universal Love and Universal Salvation are where I feel God’s presence the most.

* * * * *

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A woman named Susan is binding a Bible for me, with my favorite quote about grace from Flannery O’Connor: “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” I asked her what her most radical theological belief is, and she says, “Oh boy, I’m not sure I even have a radical theological belief. Perhaps it is more of a hope. I sure do hope that all of the babies that have been aborted are with Jesus. My belief is that they are – same for those who have miscarried. I’m believing my grandchild who never saw the light of day on this earth is in heaven with Jesus. That gives me comfort.”

I want to say to Susan, “Your grandchild is with Jesus. And all the babies, too. And all the women who died from botched abortions because they weren’t legal and safe. And all the fathers who couldn’t get it together to be present. And all the children who ignored their parents. And all the parents who hurt their children. Everyone gets to be in the Kindgom of Heaven. The last, first; the first, last.”

All of us.

Categories
Belief Finding God Seeking Seeking, Finding The Bible, KJV The Bible, NIV

Suffering, Part 1: Margaret

Who were the homestead wives?
Who were the gold rush brides?
Does anybody know?
Do their works survive their yellow fever lives in the pages they wrote?
The land was free, yet it cost their lives.

— “Gold Rush Brides,” 10,000 Maniacs

A lovely woman whom I don’t remember meeting emails me periodically to check in on my faith. She’s Catholic, and named Margaret, so I probably met her at the one (1) catechism class I attended before I realized with the deep sweetness of unerring certainty that I was Not a Catholic.

We started emailing because I asked her not to email me any more. She organizes Dorothy Day Dinners (I imagine I’ll write about Day at some point in the future. I find her fetishization of the poor to be…worth writing about) and had sent an email to a group asking for people to contribute ingredients. It’s stone-soupy, if you will, if stone soup is a reference you’re familiar with.

I wrote to Margaret in early August, saying, “Please take me off your email list. I am so glad of the work you’re doing, and admire everyone. But after a lot of searching, I feel that my spiritual home is with the Quakers.”

So, as it turns out, my spiritual home is not with the Quakers, but that’s not the point of this story.

Margaret wrote back, “I have a sense of loss in reading that you are leaving our Communion and wonder if you would honor me with some details about what we are missing that you find attractive with the Quakers.”

So I did.

Margaret:

When I came to the Church, it was at a time where I finally was able to stay out of my own way about faith and God. Before, I worried that I was being intellectually disingenuous; I had always identified as an atheist, and thought that made me smarter than everyone who was a believer.

Of course, then God comes along and quietly reminds me that I’m not smarter than anyone at all. I’m just loud. 🙂

I knew I needed a spiritual home. I really thought it was going to be Catholicism. But I think there is so much culture there — being Catholic is more than just going to Mass. And I didn’t feel Catholicism in my heart at all.

Growing up in a faith tradition is easier than converting; and I feel maybe one should convert only if one cannot find what she needs in her own “home.” And I was starting out too late in the evening, as it was, to be an effective Catholic; I would have felt very behind all the time, and my disbelief would be heavy.

I found the Quakers because my husband said, “What about that?” He’s a Won Buddhist, a Korean-form of belief. (He’s not Korean, by the way.) His conversion was also circuitous. He had gone to a Quaker school in North Carolina (Guilford), which, by virtue of being a contemplative religion, made stretching into Eastern traditions less jarring, I’d guess. I went to my first meeting, and was sort of overwhelmed with peace and love. I could start there, from the beginning; whereas, while everyone was lovely and welcoming to me when I came to my one (and only) catechism class, I didn’t feel like I was starting from a place of love. I felt like I was starting only from a place of struggle.

I now identify as a Quaker with a sense of Flannery O’Connor about myself, and an appreciation of Gerard Manley Hopkins. So I’m not completely hidden from Catholicism.

Again, I can’t stress enough how much I now do not identify as a Quaker, though I admire them greatly. Our breakup was not the never-speak-to-me-or-my-good-strong-sons-again type. I just need more religion in my religion than unprogrammed Quakerism provides. I need the Bible. I need God and Jesus. I need pews and awkward hymns and a sermon because, as it turns out, I really need structure. I didn’t grow up feeling necessarily safe and secure; when I feel like things are too come-what-come-may my anxiety spikes and I’m left chewing the skin around my fingers and counting my steps to soothe myself.

My friend Steve, through a teacher he had, explained to me once that one is probably best served within the religious tradition in which they were raised. Those cultural groundings are important. It’s not a necessity — clearly, as Zach is incredibly content and thriving in Buddhism. But, as I learn more about myself and my relationship to faith, it is a necessity to me.

I later sent Margaret an email with a link to an essay I wrote. I titled it “of possible interest” and she very graciously said, “I probably will not be able to check in on your web site but things change and I may find time to do so in the future.” I love Margaret very much, and her honesty. I probably wouldn’t have time to read my own writing, too, but would lie to me and say, “I can’t wait to read this tonight.” But I’m trying not to be like that. Margaret went on to write, “My ex-husband’s health is declining and very soon I am going to need to give more of my time to him.” She also said, “Today, I am going to try and get through the heat, cook and can spaghetti sauce and make an offering of my day to God.” And she closed by asking for prayers for her and her family.

(The thesis of this post, by the way — suffering — we’re getting to it. I promise.)

A few weeks ago I completed hospice training. As part of my religious focus, on myself and the world, this felt like something I could give that also needed giving. Right now, it makes me feel useful. My hope is that it will make me humble. There’s something self-serving in announcing, “I PROVIDE HOSPICE CARE.” And it’s there because we’re humans, with human feelings and emotions. Even Christ let slip he was the Son of God every now and again, and he was both wholly human and wholly divine.

“You sound dead-set on turning your stove on today, so I won’t counsel against it. I baked cookies on Sunday and thanked God for air conditioning,” I wrote her back, among a bunch of other things, including how now, at 40, I’m better able to hear the Still Small Voice of God. When I was younger — in my 20s — I expected, or, rather, demanded, that God speak to me in a Giant Booming Voice. And when He didn’t, I told myself, ‘Well, that proves it. He doesn’t exist.’ But none of us are smart in our 20s. Now, in my 40s, I hear God in the still small voice from 1 Kings. I think about the Parable of the Mustard Seed, and how a very small faith, if well-tended, can provide safety and shelter. It is incredibly humbling. And such a great rejoinder to Twenty-Year-Old Mike, who didn’t know how to listen.

Margaret explained the stove thing to me:

The stove thing is because my garden had produced a nice crop of tomatoes and I must “do” something with them and not let them spoil. I often think, at this moment each year, about the pioneer women, or even early 20th c. women who slaved over a wood heat stove to can. They died young but at least I have made it to 70 and have fans. If I make the heat today a prayer, it is called the prayer of the body. What I mean is this: I pray aloud or silently and this is pleasing to God. If I offer my whole day to God, my prayers, works, joys and suffering, and I unite myself to His passion and death, then suffering the heat of the day IS a prayer.

And we’re where I need us to be, now. Thee and me, we are all caught up. Because I want to think about religious suffering for a few more words.

I want to make this clear at the start: my religious beliefs and practices are very much mine. They’re influenced by what I’ve read, what I’ve heard, whom I’ve met, and what feels right to me, which is ever changing as I’m influenced by the aforementioned three other things. (“I’m new in town…” — John Mulaney) I’m sure this is true for a lot of my brothers and sisters in Christ. The idea of God requiring suffering from me is so foreign, so unutterably alien, that I am actively compelled away from the idea of lovingkindness when considering it. Faith that values suffering is a faith that I don’t wish to have. It is a faith that is alien to me. It’s a faith, nonetheless; it’s just not mine own, mine own, mine own.

Within my faith practice, suffering is something I commit against myself. When I push against the mystery of God, when I give in to harmful/uncaring thoughts against my self (cf Cheri Huber, e.g.), I cause suffering. I can also cause others to suffer, too, which is reflected back on to me like rubber and glue. There is no good in suffering, as far as I can see. And Christ, of all people, certainly does not need my suffering to weigh the love I have for Him.

But it’s Margaret’s, and not mine to take from her, or disavow to her.

“Ok, I begin,” she ends.

Categories
Belief Seeking Seeking, Finding

Mystery

“I was here and this house was here, you and I and this evening were here, and they had always been here.”

— John Fowles, The Magus

I am halfway through my second try at The Magus. Assume that until I tell you otherwise I’m still in media res, and do not spoil the end. I’m halfway through The Magus; I’m technically nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita; but I’m at the beginning of what feels like a spiritual journey — but a journey I’ve started before, with little success. One worries one starts too late in the evening to return home before dark; but maybe one isn’t supposed to return home, and maybe one shouldn’t mind the night.

The Magus cover

I read The Collector by Fowles first. If you’ve not, I’m definitely going to spoil things and your journey is your journey and maybe you don’t care about endings but maybe just this once, for this, give yourself the gift of Mystery. Anyway, any book worth reading is worth reading twice.

Magus tarot cardFowles is…I’m not sure what he is w/r/t religion. We’ll say he’s atheist until someone tells us different but please never tell me things because I am far too handsome at this point to learn. And yet, he’s deeply interested in concepts of free will and fate, of determination and destiny. Can they be reconciled? Should they? What if I finished this post in nothing but rhetoricals?

In The Collector, a man named Frederick abducts a woman named Miranda so if you were saving The Collector because it sounded like a cozy Charing Cross Road-type novel it is almost entirely the opposite except the room Miranda is kept in actually sounds pretty nice. She is ineffably beautiful to Frederick, whom she calls Ferdinand, because Fowles has read Shakespeare and wants you to know it. (He wrote it when he was 37, which is a little long in the tooth to be preening for praise with your allusions and et cetera but also notice how seamlessly I worked in a reference to Dante yes I am 46.) (Having made my jab at Fowles I want to go on record as saying the book is upsettingly perfect and you should read it and if you haven’t and you’re reading this then how dare you ignore my Very Good Advice.) While Miranda certainly despises Ferdinand for the kidnapping — as well she should — she also despises collectors in general. She sees art, in all its forms, whether manufactured or the art of nature, as communal, no more yours to do with as you want as it would be hers. Collectors keep things hidden away, or grandly allow what should be humbly proffered.

The-Collector

The main character of The Magus (I have no idea how to pronounce the title of the book, by they way, and neither do you, so don’t get those typing fingers ready to tell me. My friend Steve says it’s may-gus, which I hate. Someone else said it’s may-jus. I say maa-jus both because it doesn’t sound like maggot at all and because if it’s the plural of magi, then it should sound like magi and don’t you dare tell me how to pronounce magi either. Really: I am simply too attractive to know one more thing that I didn’t already start with) is a man named Nick and you can come to your own conclusions about him as a human being, because you were granted the gift of discernment by Hashem Himself, but if it is at all positive then I’ll need to rescind your gift because that’s my purpose on Mother Gaia. He’s entitled, much like Ferdinand in The Collector in the way both want to own women’s bodies. Though Nick is less kidnappy, that’s honestly damning him with faint praise. Nick falls under the spell of a man named Maurice (pronounced the French way, moor-reese) Conchis (with a soft, rather than hard, ch so it sounds like conscious which is clever but I only figured it out when I was saying his name aloud to my friend Steve on the 25th day of August in the Year of Our Lord, 20 and 18). Conchis lays out elaborate mind games for Nick, and Nick, when not being physically abusive to women, spends his time trying to peek behind the curtain.

It may be that, reading the books this close together highlights things that aren’t really highlightable, that I’m seeing connections where there maybe wouldn’t generally be.

I’m struck by the similarities between Miranda in The Collector and Nicholas in The Magus: both are in environments tightly controlled by someone else — Frederick and Conchis respectively. Both resist the opportunity to participate in the mystery before them. Both suffer. Miranda dies in the end, and Nicholas’s fate is still unknown to me and a man at Bible Study this morning was well on his way to spoiling the whole thing for me until I shushed him, but politely, because we’re Baptists, and shushing is next to holiness.

There’s an element of Flannery O’Connor* to this reading — the idea that there is something important and transformative in Miranda’s captivity — but I think it’s there. She is on the way to understanding herself and her relationships, with her family and the older artist with whom she had had an unsatisfying affair, and it’s the situation — her abduction and confinement — that is encouraging her self-reflection, which is something she had not done much of before. I mean, was she going to be magically let go if she had stayed and found herself fully actualized? Dude’s a kidnapper, so probably not. But then, maybe the answer key to this philosophical test says that if she truly understood herself and her decisions and her past, she would stay with Frederick regardless. But that also means that we’d have to see him, at the end, looking for another acolyte rather than another victim. Tomayto/tomahto.

[* I am going to write two Flannery O’Connor-based short stories. The first will be called “Flannery O’Connor’s Grand Day Out” and it will star my husband, Zach, who will take O’Connor on a pilgrimage of hedonism. The other will be called “Flannery O’Connor as Calvinist” and it will be short vignettes of domestic life where the protagonist dies in the end after either having a wonderful time at the party, or murdered while not thinking about how unworthy he is of God.]

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Zach, drinking fondue chocolate through a makeshift straw. I love him so goddamned much you guys.

Nicholas also fights against the mystery, and wants to be in control. Fowles is working back and forth between arguments for free will and arguments for destiny. This is encapsulated in that marvelous passage delivered by Conchis about 100 pages into the novel, and which I quoted above:

“I was here and this house was here, you and I and this evening were here, and they had always been here.”

This is echoed in other places throughout the book — most recently in the section I just finished where Nick and Alison are hiking the mountain. Nick feels, for a moment, as if he was always supposed to be on that particular mountain with this particular woman. He’s also hella horny and they fuck after swimming in a small lake and the thing about that is: it’s really none of my business.

Flannery O’Connor says, “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” Miranda is transformed, in the end, in her death. Will Nick be as gracious to the mystery?

Don’t tell me.

Categories
Belief God New Testament Old Testament Seeking The Bible, KJV The Bible, NIV

“I Guess I’ll Read My Bible Elsewhere”

A few weeks ago, at the Meeting House, Zach was breathing too loudly while he was sitting in quiet contemplation for the still small voice of God. A woman in front of us, panicked but also terrible, kept turning around. Zach’s eyes were closed, because, again, as I said, he was sitting in quiet contemplation for the still small voice of God that comes from within. His breathing shouldn’t have been a prob– I’m getting ahead of myself, or at least away from the story I want to tell.

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So, a few weeks ago, at the Meeting House, Zach was breathing too loudly and this woman was losing her mind. Zach finally opened his eyes for a moment — I think someone was giving a testimony — and the woman began to artlessly sign at him not because she was deaf or hard of hearing, or even that she thought Zach was, but because the strict letter of the law in a Quaker Meeting House is silence, unless you’re moved to speak. She was following the letter by silently, yet animatedly, gesturing for him to not exhale.

Zach didn’t know what she was going on about.

“What’s she going on about?” he asked me. I maintained eye contact with the woman in front of him, our itinerant signer, and said, in a normal speaking voice not whispered for a Meeting: “She hates that you’re breathing.”

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My religious background — what little there is — and my social background — what even littler — are sort of Southern Baptist. My mom is from Arkansas and has, even in the dark thick of Alzheimer’s, the full recipe for the best fried chicken you’ll ever eat, as well as a passive-aggressive spin for everything. She once said a baby was as cute as it could be — and that wasn’t a compliment. Another time, describing a relative’s two-year-old: “I could love her more if I saw less of her.” Visiting my house — actually, the first time she visited a house I was living in — she walked in, looked at the clutter (that looked tidy to me), ran her finger across the top of a dusty bookcase, and said, “Y’all must be so busy.”

I paint this picture because what I desperately wanted to do during the time of the meeting where we hold people who need healing in the light, is to stand and say, “I’d like to hold Laura, sitting in front of me, in the light. Her ears are giving her fits like to ruin her life. Sensitive to breathing, you see.”

But I didn’t. Because I was raised right*.

[* I was not.]

Earlier this week, after Meeting, I went up to that day’s Friendly Ear. (It all gets sort of Gileadish, what with its Friendly Ear and Gilead’s Under His Eye, but may the Lord open, they are totally different.) I wanted to find out if there was a group of local Quakers who read the Bible together. And then it all got sort of escalated?

I’ll quote from some email exchanges, but leave names out.

First, I’ll try to describe the in-person interaction:

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Mike: I was wondering if there was some sort of group that meets together to read the Bible here?

Ear: Oh. I. Erm. I.

Mike: I have a directory — should I just look there?

She decides I need to speak with this other person, who is on the Religious Education Committee. It takes some time to find her. Some said she had already left. Some said she was by the punch. She did turn up, but from where remains an ineffable mystery unless you ask her directly, then you’d know.

Ineffable Mystery: Hi, I hear I’m being looked for!

Ear: Yes. This young man is interested in Bible study.

Ineffable Mystery: Oh. I. Erm.

Ear: That’s what I said!

Ineffable Mystery: That’s not really something we have. We have a lovely library, and a book group. Is that what you mean?

Mike: No, I mean, those are great, but I’m interested in a weekly group of some number of people who get together and read the Bible.

Ineffable Mystery: So you have experience teaching the Bible?

Mike: No — and that’s not what I am looking for. This is really more like a book group, but for the Bible.

Ear: Oh, we have a book group! Maybe you didn’t know about that?

Mike: I don’t want to read The Kite Runner is the thing. I just want to read the Bible. With other Quakers. Together.

Ineffable Mystery: Well, I don’t know if that’s something I would be into or not.

Ear: Yeah, it’s not something we do. We have a different relationship with the Bible.

Ineffable Mystery: Yeah.

Mike: [channeling his mother, Patricia Kelly] Okay. Well, it sounds like my church isn’t the place to read the Bible and I’ll figure something else out.

— FIN —

So, to the emails. First, the Ear wrote me:

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I have been thinking about your question of having a reading group on the Bible partly because I think Ineffable Mystery and I gave you a pretty inadequate response. [Several] things have occurred to me since:

1. Although many Quakers are extremely knowledgeable about the Bible and would appreciate having the opportunity to reflect on passages together, there may not be many of them [here]. On the other hand, there may be some who would be delighted to know of your interest and a new group may form. To that end, if you would send me a brief description of what you have in mind, I would be happy to forward it to everyone…asking them to be in touch with you.*

[* This is literally all I wanted from the very beginning. Just that. Ask others! Some may, some may not!]

2. I mentioned the Spiritual Formation program at the rise of Meeting and this is a program in which small groups within the Meeting get together twice a month to share reflections on spiritual readings, which certainly could include the Bible.* You may wish to become a part of that program.

[* My heart sank here, dear reader, when I thought, “Fuck. I bet they read The Alchemist.”]

I replied with my bona fides and a bit more about what I was interested in accomplishing.

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Friendly Ear! This email was so wonderful! Thank you. I felt bewildered (through my own fault) when I left our conversation last Sunday. This email really helped. I’m also just generally socially awkward; however, I’m also stunningly handsome. God doesn’t give with both hands. (I KID.)

A bit about me: I have been coming to Meetings for about 2 months now. I am new to Quakerism, and new, really, to religion. But everyone has been so warm and welcoming; I really feel I made the right choice.

My day job is in Regulatory Financial Compliance: I make sure banks and creditors and collection agencies stay on the right side of the law. I love it because it involves knowing the rules and explaining them — two things of which I am inordinately fond.

My passion, though, is in literature. I read an upsetting amount. I have been lucky enough to have run the library’s Classics in Context program for the past 12 years. It is one of the more popular reading groups offered by the library, and I get to read with some incredibly intelligent people. I have never left a book discussion with any of my assumptions about the book intact.

I have also been privileged to be invited to lecture to a variety of audiences, primarily on 19th century history, culture, and literature. I have lectured to the Victorian Society of North American, Washington D.C. chapter; The Gay & Lesbian Alliance; Oasis Lifelong Learning; and for Bethesda Live & Learn. Where I am most interested is in how people perform certain actions. I call it performative morality and actual morality when I’m talking about how the Victorians acted towards, say, the poor.

What I am hoping for is one of these two options:

1) An already-existing Bible group who read the Bible from a Quaker perspective, but with room for personal readings people may come with. (It sounds like this doesn’t exist.)

2) A need for one, and I could facilitate it.

My interest is not at all in saying, “This is what this passage means,” or posing in any way like an expert. I’m as confused by the Bible as anyone else — and that’s what is so intriguing to me about this project. It’s a chance for me to hear many other interpretations, among people, other Quakers, whom I love and respect.

This can all be done entirely free. And it would mean a lot to me as a new member to use the Quaker space as a spiritual home.

I’m available for any questions or follow-ups you may have.

This didn’t get me any closer to where I wanted to be.

giphy (3)

Dear Mike,

I just found this excellent bibliography of Quaker-oriented Bible study books and courses:

https://www.nyym.org/content/quaker-resources-the-bible

I would be glad to talk further with you about your thoughts about this.

I replied:

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Thank you so much! I will read through these.

In case this wasn’t clear: it’s not that I’m confused about the Bible and looking for experts. I thought that a group of like-minded people, reading a book like the Bible and other texts*, might enrich each other with their personal thoughts and reactions.

[* I’ll be honest here: I threw in that “other texts” nonsense because I thought they’d be more interested/receptive if they thought I’d bring in some Eckankar, a religion I know about only because a straight boy I was obsessed with named Johnny was an Eckist so I’d like my Comparative Religions doctorate now please and thank you.]

If a Bible reading group doesn’t feel at all like a good fit, that is fine! I don’t need special accommodations; I just like reading and sharing ideas and the Bible has some common currency among us.

I wasn’t supposed to send the above email. I had met with my therapist yesterday (Tift Pelias, if you’re in the market; tell him Mike sent you!), and talked about how my go-to strategy is to react, rather than respond, when I’m feeling aggrieved. React is sort of following your body’s lead, which isn’t a problem necessarily when your mind and your body are functioning as a team. My brain and body function as a buddy cop movie with none of the fun stuff included and the cops hate each other. When I react, it’s almost always based on bad, biased information. Responding, however, is taking your reaction, and a moment, and sitting with both. Ask if what you’re feeling is true, or if it’s just convenient. (Sometimes anger is a convenient feeling or me because it justifies my bad mood and terrible behavior.)

So, I was going to start practicing responding over reacting and I was going to write out my email response, quoted above, put it aside, read it to Zach (this is key; he keeps me in check), and then discuss how I’m feeling and if the message I’m sending is the message I meant. I was going to start that; but then I hit send rather than close and I’ve been saying, “It was by mistake,” and I may even say that that is the truth — but I’m new to not being an asshole so it very well may have been that it was That Mike who said, “Fuck it.”

So, it was perfect when the last email I received before I decided to disengage until a later date, said this:

Hi, Mike – here is an article that describes “A Quaker Approach to the Bible.” You might find it interesting.

https://universalistfriends.org/cadbury-1.html

I DO NOT WANT A QUAKER APPROACH TO THE BIBLE. I DO NOT WANT ANY APPROACH TO THE BIBLE. I ONLY WANTED A GROUP OF PEOPLE WITH A COMMON SPIRITUAL BELIEF TO COME TOGETHER ON THE REGULAR AND SAY, “Hey, guys, that story about the binding of Isaac. Man. What do you make of that?”

THAT’S WHAT I WANTED.

When I was reading a biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins (bonus poem by that guy at the end of all this), the biographer mentioned, several times, that Hopkins could not be an Anglican at all — he hungered, too much, for the actual body and blood of Christ. (“Food for the journey,” I read, once. A woman’s husband was in hospice and she made sure he received the Host every day and I find that such a beautiful and profoundly transforming story.) In Anglicanism, it’s all metaphorical. For Catholicism, which Hopkins was inexorably drawn towards, it’s literal. (Flannery O’Connor on Mary McCarthy and the Eucharist: “Mrs. Broadwater [Mary McCarthy’s married name] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the ‘most portable’ person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.’ That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”)

flannery-oconnor

My hunger isn’t for the Host at all. Catholicism is, for me, best understood as a mystery that I am glad exists, but have no interest in engaging. But my hunger is for the Bible, and the Quakers are VERY weird about it.

Some of that might be where the Bible sits within Quakerism, which is shakily, and off to the side. Quakers see the Bible as an interesting document of God’s revelations from a specific time and place; they do not see it at all as an item that bears any more weight than today’s revelations experienced during a Quaker Meeting. In fact, primacy of the Bible can be seen to undermine today’s revelations from God.

But I have yet to hear, at a Quaker Meeting, anything so lovely as “Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know” (Job 42:3). It’s mostly well-meaning white people wanting to perform responsibility. Several meetings, someone will stand up and either announce their intention of going to the border to help with the family issue, or someone will stand up and say, “My heart is breaking because I know I can do good at the border for those families, but I do not have the resources to get there.” This all smacks a little of Mrs Jellyby, obsessed with an obscure African tribe, rather than proferring help to those in London or even, God forbid, her own children. The help we want to give — the showy, busy, selfless work — is rarely the help that is needed. And the help that is needed is often boring, with no glamour to it.

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“Mrs Jellyby was looking far away into Africa.” — C. Dickens

So, what is to be done? I don’t know. I want to continue my spiritual journey towards/with God; however, I am worried that maybe the Quakers aren’t the home for me that I want. Which puts me in the wonderfully awkward position of visiting a local Baptist church this Sunday. I know they read the Bible there.

Pied Beauty — Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things—
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
       For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
       And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                     Praise Him.

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Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844 – 1889