RIP

"My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law." Richard Rorty

There's Art On My Pizza

Couple things...Sarah's been working away on Goose Girl stuff...Paint and wooden blocks everywhere...Sam picks up a piece of half-eaten pizza with some paint on it and cries out, "There's art on my pizza!" I just wanted to make a record of that somewhere. And the amazing person pictured to the right, Ursula K. Le Guin, opens her _Four Ways to Forgiveness_ with the best description of actually receiving a written text (call it apocalypse) I can recall. Read away, mes amis:
"On the planet O there has not been a war for five thousand years,” she read, "and on Gethen there has never been a war." She stopped reading, to rest her eyes and because she was trying to train herself to read slowly, not gobble words down in chunks the way Tikuli gulped his food. "There has never been a war:' in her mind the words stood clear and bright, surrounded by and sinking into an infinite, dark, soft incredulity. What would that world be, a world without war? It would be the real world. Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality. But my people, she thought, know only how to deny. Born in the dark shadow of power misused, we set peace outside our world, a guiding and unattainable light. All we know to do is fight. Any peace one of us can make in our life is only a denial that the war is going on, a shadow of the shadow, a doubled unbelief.
So as the cloud-shadows swept over the marshes and the page of the book open on her lap, she sighed and closed her eyes. thinking, "I am a liar." Then she opened her eyes and read more about the other worlds, the far realities.

Woman's Work is Alchemy: daily life is what gives substance to transcendent ideas. Matter. Mater. Mother.

Sarah here. I have another moment and wanted to share what I have been reading lately. Thank you to all who posted replies to my last entry. I was especially moved by everyone's openness and receptive imaginations. I wanna be more likes youse.

Ladies, anything ring here? And fellas, handle with historically sensitive, kingdom-ish, imaginative, macho-less (all respect),"neither slave nor free...", care. love to all.

It’s impossible to give our children as much attention as they need, never mind half as much as they want, for the simple reason that there isn’t enough to go around, and every mother is in competition with her children for the available supply. No matter how much she tries to do each day, she’s aware of scanting something else, something vital and timebound that won’t wait for her to catch up. Her children will be grown up and gone from home before she finds the clarity of soul she wants to devote to them. Her house will crumble, or she’ll have moved out before she ever gets it in order. Or she’ll give herself to her house and children, and her poems will never be written. More likely, both. Each part of her is inadequately served, no matter how strenuously she neglects the other.

Joan Gould _Spinning Straw Into Gold_

Eraserhead

Catching the Big Fish is David Lynch's book on Transcendental Meditation, creativity, staying sane, and many a snippet on being aware of what's going on in yor head. Quite a treasure for someone (like me) who thinks about Lynch all the time. So thankful for him. Here's Lynch on Eraserhead:

Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. No one understands when I say that, but it is.

Eraserhead was growing in a certain way, and I didn't know what it meant. I was looking for a key to unlock what these sequences were saying. Of course, I understood some of it; but I didn't know the thing that just pulled it all together. And it was a struggle. So I got out my Bible and I started reading. And one day, I read a sentence. And I closed the Bible, because that was it. And then I saw the thing as a whole. And it fulfilled this vision for me, 100 percent.

I don't think I'll ever say what that sentence was.

Call It Acting

Here we have Divine Sarah (a.k.a. Sarah Bernhardt), and a little piece in the New York Review of Books has us very pleased with her. To the right is her Hamlet. Here she is on acting:
"I love, I adore my profession. I serve it constantly. I never stop acting. I've always acted—always and everywhere, in all sorts of places, at every instant—always, always. I am my own double. I act in restaurants when I ask for more bread. I act when I ask Julia Bartet's husband how his wife is feeling. Blessed work that fills me with drunken joy and peace, how much I owe to you!

Cosmic Plainspeak: A Bit of Back and Forth with Brian Mclaren

Well...Mclaren's one of my favorite people. He submitted to my e-mail questions many months ago, and I'd assumed it would find its way on Lowercase People, but no dice. Here tis. And thanks to Brian for being so incredibly cool. There's a link to his site over to your right:

DD: What's the last musical recording you purchased?

BM: I just purchased a collection of music from a variety of artists from Mali (in Africa) from Putumayo World Music. It's the happiest and most exciting music I've heard in a long time, even though I don't understand one word of lyric.

DD: Sarah and I have been beaming lately as our kids request repeated listens of Bruce Cockburn (you guessed it: "Wondering Where the Lions Are") as we drive around in our minivan. We understand you're pretty batty for Cockburn too. What keeps you going back to him?

BM: Ah, great question. It sounds daft to say "The lyrics and the music,"but that's about it. I guess I could also say "the politics and the mysticism" or "the honesty and the hope" or "the cynicism and the sincerity." I think two of the greatest songs ever written are Bob Dylan's "Every Grain of Sand" and Cockburn's "Rumors of Glory" ...along with "Fascist Architecture" and "Understanding Nothing" and ...I'd better stop there.

DD: How funny. We've made a tradition of listening to "Rumors of Glory" on the kids' drive to school each morning. I think I once read where Elvis Costello named Dylan's "Every Grain of Sand" as a favorite all-time single. Somehow, simultaneous sincerity and cynicism might name my favorite genre in any medium. Sounds awfullly biblical really. Devastatingly (and hopefully) reality-based. What film earns your highest recommendation and why?

BM: What film in all of history? Wow, that feels like a pretty scary question. In the last year, by far it's "Hotel Rwanda." To me, the film does what good art should do ... it humanizes, informs, moves, disturbs, and creates a longing for something holy. I'm a big fan of stupid movies too, the best of which (to me) is Weird Al Yankovic's "UHF." As for somewhat-oldies ... I'm a big fan of "The Color Purple" and "Mr. Holland's Opus."

DD: Play the sunset!! Any science fiction that's done anything for you?

BM: I often refer people to "Contact" to understand the modern-postmodern transition. It captures the issues beautifully. I actually like Science Fiction a lot ... I'm a fan of several of Orson Scott Card's books. But outside of the Star Trek movies, I'm drawing a blank on any science fiction movies that I've seen. Star Wars never really grabbed me for some reason.

DD: Where should I begin with Orson Scott Card? I've been meaning to give him a looksee for ages.

BM: Ender's Game is a quick read, along with Speaker for the Dead and Xenophobia. But he has a series called "Return to Earth" that's really pretty strange and powerful. And his "Alvin Maker" series is also good. A few things of his that I've read were crappy.

DD: What do you think of when you hear the phrase, "social justice"?

BM: I think of the prophets of the Old Testament telling us that God is sick of all our religious music and meetings, and that God wishes we would do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.

DD: Where do you see this happening?

BM: Well, I'm on the board of Sojourners (sojo.net), and I'm a fan of their work over the decades now. The Catholic Worker movement, the Consistent Life movement, and the New Monasticism movement are all wonderful examples of this prophetic voice. With Evangelicalism now filling the role of America's civil religion (replacing Mainline Protestantism in the 1970's), we really need these alternative visions of what the Christian faith is supposed to be, other than a) a civil religion, or b) an isolated subculture.

DD: Or a special interest group. It recently occured to me that the term "evangelist" ought to mean "multipartisan good news bringer" with an open door to dialogue over whether or not the news proffered by the supposed evangelist is actually good for most parties. I think of Sojourners as a powerful resource for dialogue and a "How To Get Embodied" check list for a demonstrably good news proclamation. So many ways of being pro-human. How do you differentiate between politics and religion?

BM: First, it depends on how you define politics. If you define it as the game between left and right, then they are so far apart I don't have to differentiate them any more than I have to differentiate blue whales from bluebirds. If you define it as how people get to seek to get along harmoniously and productively and wisely, then I'd say politics is an expression of religion. Second, it depends on how you define religion. If you define it as in-groups and out-groups arguing about God, then it seems to be a form of politics (defined as the game between left and right). If you define it as the search among human beings for our highest purpose and meaning, then I'd say it and politics are two wings on the bluebird or two fins on the blue whale.

DD: I remember reading somewhere that they're essentially two words, alternatively treasured and detested, for the same thing. And I found I couldn't quite disagree. I guess when someone says "I'm not political" or "I'm not religious, I'm spiritual," they're often just trying to communicate that they aren't prone to quibbling or being aggressively judgemental. "Spiritual" is the one that bugs me lately, because it often seems like a way of disembodying the devastatingly life-giving, earthbound social criticism of the biblical witness. Do you happen to have any useful uses for the word "spiritual?

BM: Well, I see your point, especially if the word plays into old dualisms like spirit versus body or spiritual versus secular. More sanguinely, I think many people use the word to refer to the parts of their lives that can't be reduced to biology, physics, economics, and cosmetics. But even there, if we create another inward versus outward dualism, we're missing the point - which is that the two interpenetrate, and that both inner and outer worlds are a mess and need healing for the same reasons.

DD: I'll take "spiritual" as the irreducible; that which transcends every mode of compartmentalization. I suppose I especially cringe when folks talk about how they're doing "spiritually" as if it's a separate category from how they're treating people, spending money, or consuming. I guess I also think of it as a marketing term that ends up messing with our ability to think coherently.

BM: Amen on that.

DD: How does George W. Bush's talk of God most differ from yours?

BM: We're both fallen human beings who are prone to pontificate about God in ways that put both of us in the need of much mercy. While I am less prone than our president to equate American national interests with God's will, I am surely wrong and misguided in my own ways too.

DD: Are there any career politicians whose work or voting record you find encouraging?

BM: I think of the retired Mark Hatfield of Oregon and his great legacy as a Republican who voted from a thoughtful life of faith. I'm sure there must be some more contemporary people ... but since I can't think of too many at the moment, maybe that says something. By and large, I have the most confidence in Catholic legislators who are well catechized in Catholic social teaching (not the ones who join Evangelicals as being one- or two-issue voters). I'm hoping more of them will speak out more vigorously in the coming years.

DD: Would you include Dennis Kucinich among them?

BM: I don't know anything about Kucinich's faith commitments, but it would make perfect sense to me to learn that his politics flows from Catholic social teaching. Perhaps we are nearing a day where intelligence and moral reflection are seen as a necessary asset for our political leaders ... not just "likability" or rhetorical ability or the ability to play the game.

DD: Yes indeed. These days, it's almost as if being a genuinely self-critical, person who's eager to discover how much he/she has yet to know would be perceived as a liability. Nobody feels like they can change their mind in public. What do you appreciate most about the work of Jacques Derrida?

BM: I believe his work, contrary to what many folk say, was at heart a moral endeavor, a sustained attempt to show that the "justice" of western colonialism was a fraud and deserved to be deconstructed ...so that a higher justice could possibly show through. I know a lot of people think he was overly mischievous and troublesome in so doing, but as Kierkegaard said, it is not an easy thing to dislodge people who are held in the grip of a cherished illusion.

DD: That's my feeling too. I think it was in a Brueggemann footnote that I read Derrida saying "Justice isn't deconstructible." I found that very helpful in all kinds of ways. What would you recommend as a good start for someone wanting to know more about Derrida or deconstructionism.

BM: I'd recommend Jack Caputo's "Deconstruction in a Nutshell." His "Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida" is also very moving - but not an easy read, as is "God, the Gift, and Postmodernism." On a more popular level, Bruce Ellis Benson's "Graven Ideologies," and Carl Raschke's "The Next Reformation" are helpful. Jamie Smith has a book called "Who's Afraid of Postmodernism" or something close to that - and it is excellent (I just read the manuscript). I'd also recommend people check out a new website - anewkindofconversation.com. The posting there by Mabiala Kenzo is utterly fantastic.

DD: If you could assign one book to high school Seniors across the country, what would it be?

BM: I think it would be "King Leopold's Ghost." Or maybe David Quammen's "The Song of the Dodo." Or maybe Annie LaMott's "Traveling Mercies," although this one would probably be removed by censors. Maybe I'd give them the Book of Genesis, the Book of Ruth, the Book of Ecclesiastes, and the Book of Luke in one bound volume.

DD: Have you read any JD Salinger?

BM: His "Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters" brought tears to my eyes on many occasions.

DD: With whom would you most like to be stuck in an elevator for two hours?

BM: Jane Goodall Or Desmond Tutu.

DD:What is it about Jane Goodall?

BM: Jane's biography for me epitomizes the postmodern turn, in the best sense of the word. First, you're a detached observer taking notes on chimpanzees in the jungle. Then you name them - you enter into a relationship with them. There goes "objectivity." Then you grow to love and respect them. Then, when one is brutally killed by poachers, you weep for them and dedicate the rest of your life to saving them, protecting them. Then you realize that you can't save chimpanzees without saving the rainforest. Then you realize you can't save the rainforest without changing the way people think and value and believe and live. At that point, you've become (in the best sense of the word) an evangelist, trying to save the world.

DD: That's rather beautifully put.

BM: I also love Jane Goodall because she sees science and faith as beautifully integrated. She sees the wonder and mystery of evolution as God's creation. A friend of mine went to hear her speak about chimpanzees and her work at Gombe, and my friend wept through the whole lecture. "The weird thing," she said, "was that I didn't know why I was weeping. And weirder still, I think everyone in the room felt almost the same way. We weren't sure why we were so moved, but we were." I think the Spirit that was "hovering over the waters" at the world's creation also hovers over places where creation is being honored, respected, loved, and saved.

DD: That’s a very good word. I can’t think of that hovering, brooding-over-the-waters image without think of the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. One particular piece of his, “Pied Beauty,” always makes me think of people who are intersexual (sometimes called "hermaphrodite") and their (I think) redemptively unsettling presence among the more definitively gendered among us. Taken alongside Flannery O’Connor’s “Temple of the Holy Ghost,” I’ve long fancied the possibility of a scene (something of a climax) in a film where a maligned, intersexual person stands up in a gathering (synagogue, church, PTA meeting) and recites Hopkins’ words:

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 áll trádes, 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.

DD: I suppose it's that part, "Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)" that gets me. In your latest book, you feature an intersexual named Pat who enters the life of your protagonist, Pastor Dan, with words of encouragement, the cosmic plainspeak of poetry, and that disarmingly blessed presence. Could you comment a little on what you had in mind with the character of Pat?

BM: A friend of mine who is a committed gay Christian refers to himself as a unicorn. He believes, before God, that who he is is precious and rare and beautiful, but so many people just want to capture him and "kill" him. We do that, don't we? When something is different – hard to categorize, hard to figure out - we try to cut it to make it fit our boxes, even if doing so destroys the beauty that could have been there.
I think of a neighbor child with Down's syndrome. There is a beauty
in him that is irreplaceable, if we have eyes to see.
That's what I tried to convey with the character Pat. I made her/him
intersexual because I think that before we can successfully understand
or respond to homosexuality, which doubtless involves complex and
invisible matters of brain chemistry or genetics or both in many cases
... we should grapple with intersexuality, which involves obvious
physical features of the genitals.
I often think that we underestimate Jesus' life and teachings; we
focus so much on his death and resurrection. The fact that he touched
lepers, befriended tax collectors, defended adulteresses, and cared
for non-Jews ... tells us that the kingdom of God is about "the other"
being seen as "my neighbor."

DD: Much of your work, to my mind, wants to prioritize God's ongoing love for all of creation (including us human creatures) over whatever issues make us anxious, unlistening, and defensive; letting the world-without-end of God's unfathomable affection frame all our tentative, feverish hashing-outs of issues. I often suspect it's an inability, on our part, to believe that God's love for us is in no way prerequisite upon us believing the right things that keeps us incapable of having good conversations or hearing the testimony of someone whose experience (or anatomy) is a challenge to our thinking. It's as if we subconsciously believe God is made angry or anxious by our own confusion as we project upon God our own quandaries. Somewhere, you describe Pastor Dan (and, in a sense, all of us) as "a mix of fragmentary insight against a backdrop of ignorance." That is such a good word and such a relief. We're called to be human and faithful as we can be within our blessED finiteness and our ongoing, not-knowing-it-all-at-all worldviews. I wish more people had a phrase like yours in mind when they described themselves as "humble sinners." I wish more of us took more pleasure in saying, "I don't know." Any words on that dark, starry backdrop of ignorance? Does _Contact_ come to mind?

BM: -- Jamie Smith, a theologian at Calvin Seminary, wrote a tremendously
helpful (to me) book with IVP called "The Fall of Interpretation." He
explores what you (very aptly!) describe as "blessed finiteness." To
think that I as a creature get to have a unique, once in a
universe-time perspective on reality - including God - is quite
stunning. Being limited to a single perspective, in this way, isn't a
limitation; it's a gift. It means I need other people and have much
to gain from them, and I have something to offer them too. I don't
think it's stretching things too far to say that a tree growing on a
mountain in a corner of Guatemala also has a unique perspective, a
unique slice of experience, possible to it and no other created thing
that ever has been or will be in the universe. It enjoys (in whatever
way trees enjoy) a unique slant of sunlight, a unique climate, a
unique kind of soil, a unique set of companions or relationships
(birds, people, lizards, whatever). And the same could be said for
every member of God's amazing community. It takes my breath away as I
think about it.
It's great you mention Contact because a kind of secondary theme in
the film - after the theme of loneliness and our search for connection
and a place in the community of creation - is the theme of humility.
We finally discover other intelligent life, and we learn that we're
pretty low on the intelligence scale! Sir Isaac Newton's so-called
laws, it turns out, only describe a narrow slice of reality, and that
slice is bounded by mystery. How funny to look back and think that we
had found the keys to everything, when really we found the keys to a
very small closet in a very big mansion.

Sifting through the madness for the Word, the Line, the Way

(sarah here) had a moment out. read this and wanted to share it. it makes me think of van gogh and trying to get at something utterly heartbroken in the hopes for something new. or something old come alive. or just anything come alive. anyhoo, here 'tis.

"A new language?"

"Yes. A language that will at last say what we have to say. For our words no longer correspond to the world. When things were whole, we felt confident that our words could express them. But little by little these things have broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos. And yet our words have remained the same. They have not adapted themselves to the new reality. Hence, every time we try to speak of what we see, we speak falsely, distorting the very thing we are trying to represent. It's made a mess of everything. But words, as you yourself understand, are capable of change. The problem is how to demonstrate this. That is why I now work with the simplest means possible –so simple that even a child can grasp what I am saying. Consider a word that refers to a thing – ‘umbrella’ for example. When I say the word 'umbrella,' you see the object in your mind. You see a kind of stick, with collapsible metal spokes on top that form an armature for a waterproof material which, when opened, will protect you from the rain. This last detail is important. Not only is an umbrella a thing, it is a thing that performs a function –in other words expresses the will of man. When you stop to think of it, every object is similar to the umbrella, in that it serves a function. A pencil is for writing, a shoe is for wearing, a car is for driving. Now, my question is this. What happens when a thing no longer perfoms its function? Is it still the thing, or has it become something else? When you rip the cloth off the umbrella, is the umbrella still an umbrella? You open the spokes, put them over your head, walk out into the rain, and you get drenched. Is it possible to go on calling this object an umbrella? In general, people do. At the very limit, they will say the umbrella is broken. To me this is a serious error, the source of all our troubles. Because it can no longer perform its function, the umbrella has ceased to be an umbrella. It might resemble an umbrella, it might once have been an umbrella, but now it has changed into something else. The word, however, has remained the same. Therefore, it can no longer express the thing. It is imprecise; it is false; it hides the thing it is supposed to reveal. And if we cannot even name a common, everyday object that we hold in our hands, how can we expect to speak of the things that truly concern us? Unless we can begin to embody the notion of change in the words we use, we will continue to be lost."

"And your work?"

"My work is very simple. I have come to New York because it is the most forlorn of places, the most abject. The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal. You have only to open your eyes to see it. The broken people, the broken things, the broken thoughts. The whole city is a junk heap. It suits my purpose admirably. I find the streets an endless source of material, an inexhaustible storehouse of shattered things. Each day I go out with my bag and collect objects that seem worthy of investigation. My samples now number in the hundreds –from the chipped to the smashed, from the dented to the squashed, from the pulverized to the putrid." "What do you do with these things?"

"I give them names."

- Paul Auster. City of Glass

sending love and hope to all reading with a sci-fi "wah-wah-wah-wah" sound, wishing for the technology to make it travel for real. everyone's so so important.

I wrote a poem for Mark Masen as a Christmas
gift to accompany a couple of mix CDs. And
I feel happier with it with every read. I
read it aloud in Pittsburgh as part of my
"On Being Able To Say Everything" talk
(ever-in-progress), and enough people
expressed interest to drive me to go ahead and
paste the thing on here. Maybe it'll be
part of a larger collection in time. Maybe said
it before: I think I'm only beginning to see
how poetry functions (how it's long functioned
in my life anyway). And i imagine this poem to
be a bit of a progress report. I'm always 
geeked to talk about it. It's a long 'un, and
I hope it'll be a benefit:


Collage Is Our Only Hope (That And Honesty)

I want to talk about this morning.
I mean to signify.
Signs Signals Significance
Signifyingness
Meaningfulness
How to mean
Not to merely say we mean well
“I meant well”
“I didn’t mean…I never meant”
But to mean well…
To let other people tell us
What we meant.
THAT IS what it all meant
There is no personal, private meaning
We don’t define what we meant.
Other people do.
The near and dear.
There’s only other people after all.
“What does what I say and do
Mean to you,
OTHER PEOPLE?”
Talk to me.
I’m listening.
You can tell me.
Hopes and fears
Of all our combined years
Are met in this possibility
Of actually sending and receiving.
Maintaining silence
Long enough to hear.
Hearing well
Giving well
Gift exchange
Meaning well is
Our meaning problem.
It’s mutual.

The work of learning how to mean.
To get it
To mean it
To lose our lives
To find them
Is called liturgy.
Beginning with confession
“We don’t even know how to mean well…
We have yet to get it.”
We’re summoned
By something other.
We’re here to learn
To cobble together meaning
To institute ceremonies
Out of thin air
As we’re here to learn
To endure
The meanings of love.
God’s love to which
We are
None of us
Especially accustomed.
Come custom.
Make us accustomed,
O Lord,
To your kingdom
With customs.
Redeem them.
Call this one Christmas.
How to let it mean?
Let us endure its meanings.

We have
A not-very-complicated arrangement of signs
To signify our seriousness
To indicate that we should be
Christened Christian
A tie
For instance
To spot the gentleman
And phrases and postures
Designed to communicate
Success
Our distance from the stupid
The lazy irresponsible selfish shameful.
Stories too
To tell ourselves to ourselves.
To angrily make known that
We’re not angry.
Not mirrored in one another
As we inescapably are.
Inescapably human form divine
Every woman
Every man.
Never quite forever lost
We hope.

The good word brings us
Back to our senses.
The good word
Redeems.

The good line makes reality
Intelligible
Unmasks what isn’t real
As unintelligible
Problematic
A problem.
Good lines articulate
Saying the devastatingly not-yet-said.
Devastating UNTIL said.
Cried out loud.
When said aloud
The words
Make us reckon with our own blindness
Our muted awareness
The good line speaks of what actually takes place…
The good line MAKES SENSE…
This is why we call it good,
Oh learners of goodness.

The good line is the lyric
And the lyric is not an escape from reality
The lyric is an attempt to engage it
(Reality)
To remember well.
To know better what we’re talking about.
To make known ourselves to ourselves.
To ring true to each other.

How hard it is
To see what’s in front of us
How hard it is
To even try to understand
Really.


Them’s got ears,
Hear.
Hear the lyric.
See the noise.
Think about it
And understand it.
Our addiction
To not following
One another’s words well
To only hearing
What we’ve already decided
In our unhearing heads
Unremembering minds
Is tight
And intense
And hardwired.

But the lyric breaks through.
It’s the breakthrough
We’ve been waiting for.
It helps us come clean
As it says what we mean.
Saying it better than we could.
So we appropriate the appropriate word.
Cut and paste.
Love and steal.
Collage away as a way of
Meaning what we wanted to say.
Ringing as true as a million churches
A million ministries
When we write the pain down.
The lyric (now ours)
Let’s the air in.
Airing out our meaning problem.

What’s the use?
Why explain complaint?
Or articulate lament?
The facts we choose to sing
Crush less
When we give them
A moment of truth
A spark illuminating
These hieroglyphs
Otherwise meaningless.
Less sorrow less shame
For a moment.
Tragedy truthfully told,
Even acknowledged,
Affords an altered state
Of kinder imagining.
Facts suffer sea change
Made rich and strange.
No cellophane salvation
No shrink-wrapped explanation
Will make us new again.
But the lyrical differs.
Prophesying cosmic plainspeak
Now
Not later
Life before death
Before rapture
But all toward hope in a day
Coming yonder
Still shining through
Already and not yet.

In light of all the light,
Let us have a meeting
Beyond advertising
And love talk.
We can have Christmas
And democracy that comes
From the feeling
That realistic
Isn’t all it’s cracking up to be.
It comes from a sorrowful feeling
That most of us are
Buying into false idols
Most of the time
That we’re barely escaping
With our lives.
Waiting on better days
Supposedly
While not bothering
With God’s image
In other people
In the meantime.
If we don’t try loving them now,
Why would we get all interested
All excited
And loving
Later on?
If we’re bored by one another now…
Why would we?

Daylight
Heavy with thunder
All going down in your mind.
Memory recording and playing back
Interpretations
Fallible selections
All too human accounts of what went down
Yesterday and today and before.
The prophet
(the one who tells truthful or at least tries)
Hunts and gathers.
Gathering intelligence,
The lyric is gathered intelligence (collage).
The lyric is the broadcast
Of living research.
Strange ways coming to our made-up minds
Sending and receiving.
Submitted for our analysis
If we have time to hear it.
The tide pulling to oblivion
Ever Ill at ease
Only has time for its own voice
Listening to its own hollowness
Hollower hollower.
Quick to anger
Quick to speak
Quick to only listen to itself
Ticker tape feeding the mind.
Lethargic whatevers
No longer susceptible to mercy
Or gracious magnanimous imaginings.

But the lyric
Like the child
Like a face
Penetrates powerlessly.
Powerless enough
To change everything
To turn the world
Upside-down.
Christmas.
A goodness by which we are known
Without ever quite returning the favor.
Too good to be known fully
More hope than our confidence can hold.
Our Conversion transformation
Waiting on our little wills
Our desires
Our force of habit.

The word made flesh
Announces that we weren’t
As it happens
Born for Hell.
No one is.
This hope
Isn’t property or boast.
It’s hope.
Hope has us.
Moves us.
Moving sun and other stars.
All gift
All grace
All along.
And forever
Calling “Come.”
Lifting us
To become what we’re called
Summoned
Born
To be
Merely be
True.

Gospel with Something to Offend Everyone

The smiling man is one Will Campbell (sometimes you're better off googling "Will D. Campbell"). And I suppose I have him in my mind as much or more than almost anyone else whenever I use a words like Church, gospel, or reconciliation. If my whole literary legacy was nothing more than popularizing him and spreading the good word of his existence, I think I will have done rather well. He's finally on Wikipedia. He's sitting (I'm guessing) in Mt. Juliet, TN right now. I feel better just thinking about him. His endorsement on the back of GATA was a high point of my life thus far. He is/was tight with MLK, Kris Kristofferson, Daniel Berrigan, Jimmy Carter, Waylon Jennings, Thomas Merton, AND Tom T. Hall. And I'm talking about him with whoever shows up at Borders on West End on Thursday night at 7:00 (reception following at Vanderbilt's Interfaith Council). I left a message on his phone to see if he'd be willing to be brought out for it (in which case, it'll be me asking him questions and him telling amazing stories), but I'm guessing that isn't going to happen. Anyway, come out if you're in the area. Either way, get busy with the google and do some intelligence gathering. That "Objectionable Subject Matter" link to the right is mostly about Will.

Children of Men

When I was but a child, I often emerged from the cinema waxing on about my just-seen, new favorite movie. My brother rightly made fun of me, and it was all completely cool. I think it's been maybe 10 years since I''ve pulled that kind of silliness, but as of Children of Men, I'm completely there again. It strikes me as the most morally thick film of recent memory. So rich. So resonating. So Kubrickish. My brother hasn't seen it, but my partner was on hand to make fun of me when I said something to the effect of, "This movie is a deal breaker. If James Dobson, for instance, can't say anything good about it, he needs to resign." And Sarah graciously pointed out that people who dig their heels in for a living (or 9to5 a brand image) aren't on duty all the time. Maybe Dobson doesn't even own a television, she said. Take it easy. Maybe the movie wouldn't register at all. Different generation. Have mercy. And she's right. But I will say that the film feels like one of those cultivating forces that hit me every so often. I want to be the target audience. I want to be associated with what the film's up to. It quieted me. It was like, "This is where the next conversation begins." Or something like that.
Anyway, somebody tell me what you made of it.
Thankee

General Welfare

The man is Paul House. He has MS. He can't shave himself or speak very coherently at this point. And he sits fading away on Tennessee's Death Row six months after the U.S. Supreme Court declared that, in light of new evidence, he couldn't possibly receive the conviction that landed him there when he was twenty-five- years-old (he's now 45). Even before the Supreme Court got involved, the late Ed Bradley did a piece on the case for 60 Minutes, but in Tennessee, I'm ashamed to say, very few people seem to be following the story.
We did a thing at Downtown Pres. last night. Julie Lee put it together. His mother came and sat in the front row as Sarah, Dave Olney, Beth Nielsen Chapman, Dave Perkins, Max Perkins, and Mindy Smith shared songs. I wrote a poem for the occasion and read it to everyone.
I'd like to urge everyone in Tennessee to research the case a little (the Nashville Scene has some good pieces. TCASK. Google away), and start telling the story. Governor Phil Bredeson is the man who can set things in motion (a full pardon) to get the man home to his mother before he dies. As I see it, every church in the state (according to their advertising anyway) ought to be advocating on his behalf. File under "Right to Life," "Social Justice," whatever.
Anyway, here's the poem (if you can call it a poem). I'm calling it
GENERAL WELFARE:

Principality, Power, Program,
Can you even
Pretend Pro-human?
We’re paying you to try it
With autopilot off.
You don’t have our consent,
Stately mechanism,
To do otherwise.
Let the record state show
Whereas whereas whereas
Razmatazz:
You’re our employee.
And tis of thee
I speak
Tennessee.
We pay you to signify
In hope of significance.
Might you still somehow signify?
Can you still be significant?
We pay you to mean well.
Can a mechanism mean?
Can the machine read meaning?
If so, let these words
Give movement
To good governing.
Trouble yourself
To be intelligible.
You're not country.
You're not music
Unless the lyric
Truthful defuses
The hardwired heart
Every broken part
Of our meaning problem
Our politics of paranoia.
Be healed.
Receive evidence.
Receive the common sense.
Receive a spirit that is holy
To be made well.
Receive an exorcism
To be made free of spirits
Merely mechanical
To be made free,
Oh unwell Tennessee,
To be made free.

Kingdom Coming

I just liked the idea of having this one up there.

Revelatory Shuffle

Laurie Anderson's "Ugly One With The Jewels" followed by Tom Waits "Chocolate Jesus" and some "Playboy Mansion" (U2) and some Tom Tom Club and then Rich Mullins asking Jesus to make him part of his story.
In short, the I-pod shuffle function is teaching me how to listen...How to let the music speak to my context...Letting the connections come....Letting the music bear witness...Appropriately freaked out and ministered unto. This is how the work gets done.
Wanted to share,
jdd

Worthy of Meditation

A rather fantastic image of the 20th century's Dorothy Day (Thank you Wood's Lot).

In that day Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria,
A blessing in the midst of the earth,
Whom the Lord of hosts has blessed, saying,
"Blessed be Egypt my people,
And Assyria the work of my hands,
And Israel my heritage."
Isaiah 19.24-25

Our Dorothy Day is snoring in a nearby room.
Peter Berrigan watched a squirrel munching on an old jack-o-lanterned pumpkin recently when he started laughing and drooling (Peter, not the squirrel).
Sam's Boston accent (it seems) is not diminishing.
Sarah sang songs for some people at a goofy little kickbutt gathering last night in a not-up-to codes corner of a church building. I feel like I'm beginning to understand what songs are for.
Graham Ward says: "We dont grasp the truth without being grasped by what is true."
Northrop Frye says poetry is "an authority which emancipates instead of subordinating the person who accepts it."
Thanks for paying heed. I'm excited over this (my first successfully transmitted internet image).
We are a beginning.
jdd

That Which Has Been Cultivated Popularly

Terry Eagleton has given us a rather breathtaking response to Richard Dawkins over at the London Review of Books. He provides the best, carefully articulated characterization of functioning Christianity I've seen in a long time. And do note his use of the phrase "popular culture." Has my mind reeling.

Google a sentence and read the thing in its entirety (me still a little thick in the link department). In the meantime, here's an excerpt. It's downright Chestertonian at times:

Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be reasonable, but that this is not at all the same thing as faith. Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster. This is not to say that religious people believe in a black hole, because they also consider that God has revealed himself: not, as Dawkins thinks, in the guise of a cosmic manufacturer even smarter than Dawkins himself (the New Testament has next to nothing to say about God as Creator), but for Christians at least, in the form of a reviled and murdered political criminal. The Jews of the so-called Old Testament had faith in God, but this does not mean that after debating the matter at a number of international conferences they decided to endorse the scientific hypothesis that there existed a supreme architect of the universe – even though, as Genesis reveals, they were of this opinion. They had faith in God in the sense that I have faith in you. They may well have been mistaken in their view; but they were not mistaken because their scientific hypothesis was unsound.

Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

This, not some super-manufacturing, is what is traditionally meant by the claim that God is Creator. He is what sustains all things in being by his love; and this would still be the case even if the universe had no beginning. To say that he brought it into being ex nihilo is not a measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of love rather than need. The world was not the consequence of an inexorable chain of cause and effect. Like a Modernist work of art, there is no necessity about it at all, and God might well have come to regret his handiwork some aeons ago. The Creation is the original acte gratuit. God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it, not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design that will impress his research grant body no end.

Because the universe is God’s, it shares in his life, which is the life of freedom. This is why it works all by itself, and why science and Richard Dawkins are therefore both possible. The same is true of human beings: God is not an obstacle to our autonomy and enjoyment but, as Aquinas argues, the power that allows us to be ourselves. Like the unconscious, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He is the source of our self-determination, not the erasure of it. To be dependent on him, as to be dependent on our friends, is a matter of freedom and fulfilment. Indeed, friendship is the word Aquinas uses to characterise the relation between God and humanity.

Dawkins, who is as obsessed with the mechanics of Creation as his Creationist opponents, understands nothing of these traditional doctrines. Nor does he understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us. Dawkins’s God, by contrast, is Satanic. Satan (‘accuser’ in Hebrew) is the misrecognition of God as Big Daddy and punitive judge, and Dawkins’s God is precisely such a repulsive superego. This false consciousness is overthrown in the person of Jesus, who reveals the Father as friend and lover rather than judge. Dawkins’s Supreme Being is the God of those who seek to avert divine wrath by sacrificing animals, being choosy in their diet and being impeccably well behaved. They cannot accept the scandal that God loves them just as they are, in all their moral shabbiness. This is one reason St Paul remarks that the law is cursed. Dawkins sees Christianity in terms of a narrowly legalistic notion of atonement – of a brutally vindictive God sacrificing his own child in recompense for being offended – and describes the belief as vicious and obnoxious. It’s a safe bet that the Archbishop of Canterbury couldn’t agree more. It was the imperial Roman state, not God, that murdered Jesus.

Dawkins thinks it odd that Christians don’t look eagerly forward to death, given that they will thereby be ushered into paradise. He does not see that Christianity, like most religious faiths, values human life deeply, which is why the martyr differs from the suicide. The suicide abandons life because it has become worthless; the martyr surrenders his or her most precious possession for the ultimate well-being of others. This act of self-giving is generally known as sacrifice, a word that has unjustly accrued all sorts of politically incorrect implications. Jesus, Dawkins speculates, might have desired his own betrayal and death, a case the New Testament writers deliberately seek to rebuff by including the Gethsemane scene, in which Jesus is clearly panicking at the prospect of his impending execution. They also put words into his mouth when he is on the cross to make much the same point. Jesus did not die because he was mad or masochistic, but because the Roman state and its assorted local lackeys and running dogs took fright at his message of love, mercy and justice, as well as at his enormous popularity with the poor, and did away with him to forestall a mass uprising in a highly volatile political situation. Several of Jesus’ close comrades were probably Zealots, members of an anti-imperialist underground movement. Judas’ surname suggests that he may have been one of them, which makes his treachery rather more intelligible: perhaps he sold out his leader in bitter disenchantment, recognising that he was not, after all, the Messiah. Messiahs are not born in poverty; they do not spurn weapons of destruction; and they tend to ride into the national capital in bullet-proof limousines with police outriders, not on a donkey.

Jesus, who pace Dawkins did indeed ‘derive his ethics from the Scriptures’ (he was a devout Jew, not the founder of a fancy new set-up), was a joke of a Messiah. He was a carnivalesque parody of a leader who understood, so it would appear, that any regime not founded on solidarity with frailty and failure is bound to collapse under its own hubris. The symbol of that failure was his crucifixion. In this faith, he was true to the source of life he enigmatically called his Father, who in the guise of the Old Testament Yahweh tells the Hebrews that he hates their burnt offerings and that their incense stinks in his nostrils. They will know him for what he is, he reminds them, when they see the hungry being filled with good things and the rich being sent empty away. You are not allowed to make a fetish or graven image of this God, since the only image of him is human flesh and blood. Salvation for Christianity has to do with caring for the sick and welcoming the immigrant, protecting the poor from the violence of the rich. It is not a ‘religious’ affair at all, and demands no special clothing, ritual behaviour or fussiness about diet. (The Catholic prohibition on meat on Fridays is an unscriptural church regulation.)

Jesus hung out with whores and social outcasts, was remarkably casual about sex, disapproved of the family (the suburban Dawkins is a trifle queasy about this), urged us to be laid-back about property and possessions, warned his followers that they too would die violently, and insisted that the truth kills and divides as well as liberates. He also cursed self-righteous prigs and deeply alarmed the ruling class.

The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live, to accept that the traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire condition. This is known as the resurrection. Those who don’t see this dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history are likely to be devotees of that bright-eyed superstition known as infinite human progress, for which Dawkins is a full-blooded apologist. Or they might be well-intentioned reformers or social democrats, which from a Christian standpoint simply isn’t radical enough.

The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you. Here, then, is your pie in the sky and opium of the people. It was, of course, Marx who coined that last phrase; but Marx, who in the same passage describes religion as the ‘heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions’, was rather more judicious and dialectical in his judgment on it than the lunging, flailing, mispunching Dawkins.

Now it may well be that all this is no more plausible than the tooth fairy. Most reasoning people these days will see excellent grounds to reject it. But critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook. The mainstream theology I have just outlined may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever. This, one might note, is the opinion of a man deeply averse to dogmatism. Even moderate religious views, he insists, are to be ferociously contested, since they can always lead to fanaticism.

Some currents of the liberalism that Dawkins espouses have nowadays degenerated into a rather nasty brand of neo-liberalism, but in my view this is no reason not to champion liberalism. In some obscure way, Dawkins manages to imply that the Bishop of Oxford is responsible for Osama bin Laden. His polemic would come rather more convincingly from a man who was a little less arrogantly triumphalistic about science (there are a mere one or two gestures in the book to its fallibility), and who could refrain from writing sentences like ‘this objection [to a particular scientific view] can be answered by the suggestion . . . that there are many universes,’ as though a suggestion constituted a scientific rebuttal. On the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity, he is predictably silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical warfare.

Eagleton rocks.

Best,
jdd

Flann O'Brien

The following is from Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. It's doing my head in. "Joe" is the name the narrator's given his own soul.

...I was deprived of definition, position and magnitude and my significance was considerably diminished. Lying there, I felt the weariness ebbing from me slowly, like a tide retiring over limitless sands. The feeling was so pleasurable and profound that I sighed again a long sound of happiness. Almost at once I heard another sigh and heard Joe murmuring some contented incoherency. His voice was near me, yet did not seem to come from the accustomed place within. I thought that he must be lying beside me in the bed and I kept my hands carefully at my sides in case I should accidentally touch him. I felt, for no reason, that his diminutive body would be horrible to the human touch--scaly or slimy like an eel or with a repelling roughness like a cat's tongue.
That's not very logical--or complimentary either, he said suddenly.
What isn't?
That about my body. Why scaly?
That's only my joke, I chuckled drowsily. I know you have no body. Except my own, perhaps.
But why scaly?
I don't know. How can I know why I think my thoughts?
By God I won't be called scaly.
His voice to my surprise had become shrill with petulance. Then he seemed to fill the world with resentment, not by speaking but by remaining silent after he had spoken.
Now, now, Joe, I murmured soothingly.
Because if you are looking for trouble you can have your bellyful, he snapped.
You have no body, Joe.
Then why do you say I have? And why scaly?
Here I had a strange idea not unworthy of de Selby. Why was Joe so disturbed at the suggestion that he had a body? What if he had a body? A body with another body inside it in turn, thousands of such bodies within each other like the skin of an onion, receding to some unimaginable ultimum? Was i in turn merely a link in a vast sequence of imponderable beings, the world I knew merely the interior of the being whose inner voice I myself was? Who or what was the core and what monster in what world was the final uncontained colossus? God? Nothing? Was I receiving these wild thoughts from Lower Down or were they brewing newly in me to be transmitted Higher Up?
From lower down, Joe barked.
Thank you.
I'm leaving.
What?

It gets better from there. O'Brien couldn't find a publisher for this particular work when he was alive. I stand amazed in the presence...If anyone's read (or is looking to read) it. Me want to talk.

Check it,
jdd

ALL THINGS GO

Well...
One Mark Miller (my new cool friend I all too often only see in the hallway at zee high school) blessed my butt by bequeathing upon me his extree Sufjan at the Ryman (9/11) ticket. And on the self-same day, the ever-wonderful Anne Coble performed a similar kindness on Sarah.
So we were there, many people apart, but both getting chills over the beauty of the whole thing. Sufjan riding the wave of a cool new way of being in the world (listen to "Chicago" over and over again and feel the buzz, procure Seven Swans and just try to not want the other albums).
My ego, as I understand it, is telling me to not get caught on the Sufjan bandwagon lest I look like a lemming ("Mustn't look like a lemming...Mustn't get seen getting mimetic"). But if I'm to be saved, as I understand being saved, I gotta leggo my ego....So...
Just plain marvelous and inspiring. Everything about it. The kind of nerd-cool (the audience, the band, Suf, all of it) that feels like it can't be co-opted...like you'll never see Sufjan in a photo looking serious with sunglasses...or if you do, you'll know that he knows it's wonderfully ridiculous. Incapable of much in the way of pose. The music was the thing. Everyone entering into it. Unself-conscious spectacle. Or open-handedly aware of its own self-consciousness, Dostoevskyan nervous giggle spectacle. Prince Myshkin...Alyosha Karamazov....Good for everyone present...
I witnessed many a former student (some of whom had proven--or at least seemed-- impenetrably resistant when I'd tried to foist flannery o'connor and all manner of strangeness upon them over the last 10 years) and here they were grooving hard and being undeniably engaged by sufjan's sounds and overall way of witness. It was getting through. Something felt undeniable about it all. What the Ryman's for...Cultivating a culture...Something's happening here and I don't what it is...
Here ends my spew.

Glad to be talking,
jdd

p.s. "America's Young Theologian" (to your right amid the linkage) might make you smile appreciatively.

Couple Things

There's a new-ish article to the right. "Everybody to the Limit," we call it. We'd be glad to hear tell if'n t makes you smile.
AND Tom Waits at the Ryman was just plain wonderful. He opened with a stomping, Come-on-down-Lord rendition of "Make It Rain." Each song seemed to require a different, rhythmic breathing exercise to get his body and voice exactly where it needed to be...just the right level of growl or howl or plaintive death-pleading.
When he got to that bit on "House Where Nobody Lives":

So if you find someone, someone to have, someone to hold 
Don't trade it for silver, don't trade it for gold
Cos I have all of life's treasures, and they're fine
and they're good 

They remind me that houses are just made of wood 
What makes a house grand oh it aint the roof or the doors 
If there's love in a house, it's a palace for sure

The place erupted in applause, and it was like "Oh Man, Everybody Here Gets It."
Anyway...Waits. Very much the blessing.
That's us for now....

love the human form divine

Sarah and I were with all the kids the other afternoon chomping on Ben and Jerry's across from Vanderbilt. Peter and Sam were jumping up and down and waving at people as they boarded a parking lot escalator made visible through a window (across the street from what was once Guido's...now an oyster bar).
One big friendly old guy walked by us twice and smiled at the kids. The third time he went ahead and told us the boys were beautiful (in a completely friendly, smiling, in-no-way-weird kind of way) and he marveled at the bright blueness of Peter Berrigan's eyes. As he walked away he shouted, "Those eyes could make the sky jealous!"
Sarah beamed over that one. I told a few of my classes about it (file under "Everyday is poetry"). Sarah just told me we should throw it down on the blog.
She sits a few feet away in a green chair in the final stretch of Middlemarch. I type and listen to the air conditioner.
Thanks for listening, Gentle Reader.

Not One...But THREE

Discerning viewers will notice not one...but THREE brand spanking new articles you ain't never seen before (if'n I haven't vainly foisted a link upon thee already). They're over yonder in the RECENT BROADSIDES section. Give 'em a looksee if you're so inclined. Maybe a morsel of feedback or a miffed-off request for clarification will get us all talking and geeked.
The first one features my doctored image in a haze of importantness. Sarah says my hair looks all poofey. Perhaps she's right.
ROCK ME AMADEUS.