The Devil's in the Details

Here are the comments I prepared for a church service on July 20, but I didn't end up speaking due to some unusual circumstances. I considered doing a revision before posting it, but decided against it; I want to post this piece as I would have read it in church. Since this was written for a church service that would have included open discussion after I finished speaking, I especially invite comments. (But, really, I always welcome your responses.)

I was asked, along with a number of other people in our church, to talk about a passage of Scripture that troubled, inspired, or otherwise stirred me in some way. Something especially meaningful. I chose Mark 1:32-39. 

Also, this is the piece of writing I'm talking about in my earlier post, "Plagiarism."

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I've recently been reading through Susan Howatch's Starbridge series. Each novel uses mostly the same cast of characters, but each is narrated by a different one, and it makes for a really interesting story. The whole series deals with individuals whose lives are, in one way or another, deeply involved with the Church of England, starting around 1930 and going through the middle part of the twentieth century. (I can't tell you how far, because I've only read the first three books.)

The first novel in the series is Glittering Images. In it, one of the main characters explains that the word “demon” is “ancient symbolic language [used to] express profound psychological truths.” The character, whose name is Jon Darrow, proceeds to counsel the protagonist with a blend of spiritual direction and sophisticated psychoanalysis. Throughout the counseling, Darrow names as demons such psychological problems as shame, guilt, anger, and fear of inadequacy. These demons attack the characters and are only beaten back by the name of Jesus, and frequently the characters are aided by holding a cross. But at the same time, they also talk through their early family experiences and use their history to make sense of their present, in a way that I think would be very familiar to most “normal” (that is, not pastoral) counselors.

On the one hand, this interpretation of demons being ancient symbolic language is helpful to me. I can be quite comfortable with the idea that terms like epilepsy or schizophrenia were not in the vocabulary of first-century Palestinians, and thus attributed to malevolent spirits who inhabited and took over people's bodies and minds. This helps me deal with the weirdness of the Gospels: I guess being like Jesus doesn't mean sending devils into a herd of pigs, after all! Of course, then there's the whole issue of why the pigs would have run down the hill and drowned themselves, and this when Jesus just a few chapters before had said if your donkey falls into a pit on the Sabbath, to go ahead and haul him out. Doesn't seem like a consistent ethic of creation care.

In addition to questions about pigs, this interpretation becomes really problematic when I think about the friends who have suffered from physical or mental pain or disease and been told by well-meaning Christians, essentially, to pray harder. Or to really believe in God's healing. Or to claim the power of the Holy Spirit.

Certainly, God encourages us to make our requests known, whether for health or anything else that might be on our hearts. And certainly God has the power to answer those prayers, though when and how and why God chooses to answer some as we would like and not others is a subject for another day.

The problem with calling all physical or psychological affliction the work of evil spirits is that it really puts the onus on the patient to recover by virtue of her tremendous faith, with gritted teeth and squinty eyes. It also can, unfortunately, put pressure on the patient to avoid conventional or non-spiritual modes of care, such as doctors, counselors, changes in diet, changes in occupation, or whatever the “secular” world might suggest.

Issues of distressed bodies and minds aside, a further problem we have to contend with is that a bunch of the demons talk back to the one performing the exorcism. The Gospels record Jesus silencing evil spirits who threaten to reveal his identity as the Messiah. And then there's the demon who says to the seven sons of Sceva, “Jesus I know and Paul I know, but who are you?” So this doesn't jive well with my preferred theory that “demon” means something more like a problem with your temper, or your genetic code. And, of course, there are the pigs.

So I'm at an impasse. If the terms “demon” and “evil spirit” really are ancient symbolic language for profound psychological truths, does that mean we all go off our meds and get exorcised? It also puts an alarming amount of responsibility on the shoulders of church leaders, since they're the ones, I'd guess anyway, who would be doing the exorcising.

And if demons and evil spirits are not symbols at all, but in fact distinct spiritual entities bent (hell bent?) on disrupting our communion with God and our souls' healing and redemption, then that leads me to ask a few more questions.

Like, why do we hear about evil spirits and demon possession so much in the New Testament, and especially in Jesus' ministry, but hardly at all in the Old Testament? All I'm really aware of are the stories of Saul, who was afflicted by an evil spirit said to be from the Lord (and thus not a demon in the New Testament sense – and just another layer of confusion); and of Job, in whose story we encounter Satan (again, not really a demon in the NT sense, and Job is a different kind of text than the OT history books and the NT gospels, and thus requires a different kind of reading).

So the Old Testament doesn't help a whole lot in elucidating the issue.

Another question is, what does the demon possession and demon exorcising of the New Testament mean for us today? We still practice communion as instituted by Jesus and practiced by the disciples and early churches. Ditto for baptism. We pray the Lord's Prayer as Jesus taught it to his disciples. We desire to be simple, truthful, holy people who live peaceful lives, as we see in the life of Jesus.

But then the demons. It's just... bizarre, right?

Then again, maybe my response has more to do with an upbringing that didn't emphasize spiritual warfare or demonic activity. Maybe I just think I'm too educated and too sophisticated to believe in something so primitive.

I don't have good answers. But these stories are part of our holy book, and right now the best I can do is say, “Okay, God, it's in there. There's some truth value here that I don't full grasp, but I'm going to keep reading and grappling with it, however weird or irrelevant or freaky it might be.” The best I can do is to let the Bible just be the big, strange book that it is, and to sit a while with the questions, even if I'm not sure whether the questions will be answered for me, or whether I'll be satisfied with the answers if I get them.

When I chafe against Biblical passages or sigh with exasperation at their inscrutability, I'm reminded that I have much the same relationship with God. It's a good reminder to let God be the big, strange God that God is, however wild or transcendent or mysterious.

In the meantime, I take an odd comfort in the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel. It's a story of naming and changing, and we're told that that encounter leaves Jacob with a limp for the rest of his life. Sometimes I think, “Poor Jacob, limping around the tents and the camels.” And other times I think, “Lucky Jacob, bearing a sign he could never ignore that he had wrestled with God.”

So I'll keep wrestling, and if I occasionally feel like I'm limping through scripture, it will be the sign I can't ignore that God has thought it worthwhile to wrestle with me.  

Plagiarism

There's an episode of Seinfeld in which Elaine submits a cartoon to the New Yorker. The cartoon shows a pig at a complaint desk, and the caption reads, "I wish I was taller." Elaine takes the cartoon around to friends to gauge their responses, thinking the drawing (and herself) pretty clever. At the end of the episode, her boss, Mr. Peterman, recognizes it as a Ziggy cartoon. Elaine realizes that she must have seen the Ziggy cartoon in the past, and that she mistakenly thought it was an original idea when she thought of it later.

Comedy turns on the silliness or outright idiocy of the characters, especially in a show like Seinfeld. We laugh at Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer because they are vain, self-centered, and deceitful. The accidental plagiarism in "The Cartoon" is about Elaine's misplaced confidence in her own creativity and wit; the audience laughs at her because her ego is cut down to size at the end of the episode when she realizes she copped the idea from another cartoonist.

But when I watch "The Cartoon," I also laugh with Elaine, and at myself, because I've done the same thing. I would never intentionally plagiarize; it's serious stuff. In fact, as I reflected on this, I realized that, at the college that employs my husband, plagiarism is, in some respects, a more serious offense than some other student conduct violations, like drinking on campus. It has a more lasting effect on your transcript, anyway. Plagiarism is more than simple theft; perhaps it's more like what we mean when we say someone's identity has been stolen. Someone's words or thoughts can't be taken from them, but they can be used as someone else's means to an end, and it's hurtful to the reputation of the source.

(Plagiarism is also a matter of getting back to the original time or place that a thought was expressed, which is why we talk about plagiarizing one's own work. That's a little bit different.)

A few years ago, something I wrote for a small newsletter was plagiarized. What happened was that my writing was mistakenly (I believe) attributed to someone else, a person who was then a student at the college. I never sought to set the record straight, because the newsletter was going to have such limited circulation, and the pieces weren't things I was planning to use in the future, or even things I was especially proud of. Perhaps I should have spoken up; perhaps I was being a little too modest. I was sure it was a mistake, anyway, so I didn't want to give anyone the feeling that I was angry with them. I'm not even sure if the student ever noticed that something she had never written was listing her as the author.

More recently, I wrote something for my church. I had been asked to comment on a passage of Scripture during our time of speaking and conversation, but that part of the service was unexpectedly postponed due to some unforeseen coincidences. No problem for me. However, the date for which I was rescheduled was a weekend I was already planning to be away from home, and therefore not in church, and after that week our church schedule shifts to a new topic of discussion. So I won't be sharing these comments in church.

"Perfect," I thought. "I'll just put that piece of writing on the blog." But as I went to post, an unpleasant thought struck me. My heart sank as I realized that I had very probably "borrowed" one of my favorite ideas in the piece from another author -- one who's quite well-known, too. I felt foolish and vain, having imagined that it was my brilliant and creative mind that had produced such an idea, when in reality I had simply read it long enough ago that it had submerged beneath my conscious thought only to resurface later. Just like Elaine with the Ziggy cartoon.

I searched for the other author's essay, and found it. I skimmed it, searching for the part that I had unintentionally stolen. Then I saw that I was using similar raw material, but taking it to a somewhat different place. As I thought about it more, I wondered if both of us had independently arrived at the same thought (as this is one that I've been mulling over for some time). After all, it seems quite likely for two Christian writers to interpret the Bible in a similar way and talk about those interpretations in a similar way.

I'm still not sure what to think. There's no way for me to know exactly where my idea came from, and retracing my mental steps only gets me back a little ways before things get murky.

I talked it over with my husband, who quoted an old Doug episode (another cartoon!) to me. One of the characters says, "If no one ever copied anyone else, we’d all be running around naked, grunting at each other."

So with that thought bolstering my confidence, plus a butterfly sticker on my arm for luck (thanks, Bug), I'll post the church piece in the near future.

Labor Pains

I wrote this Lenten reflection to share with my church on Palm Sunday of this year (March 2013). My thoughts were informed and enriched by Henri Nouwen's book Compassion, and the hymn "Fresh as the Morning [God of the Bible]" by Shirley Erena Murray.

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“You will grieve, but your grief will suddenly turn to wonderful joy – like a woman suffering the pains of labor. When her child is born, her anguish gives way to joy because she has brought a new baby into the world.” John 16:20b-21

The image of childbirth and the laboring woman is used in the Old Testament to evoke a sense of fear in the audience. The prophets use labor as a metaphor for events – terrible, distressing events – that will come upon the Israelite people suddenly, inevitably, and woefully.

In John 16, we have a record of Jesus’ words to his disciples, and he uses the laboring woman metaphor, too, but he tells the rest of the story. In keeping with the prophets, he says that the disciples’ grief over what is going to to happen to him will be like a woman suffering the pains of labor. But Jesus continues on to say that while the grief is real and the pain is intense, the anguish gives way to wonderful joy when the baby is born.

I want us to inhabit this metaphor that Jesus uses, to spend some time this morning dwelling in each of three roles – the laboring woman, the child in the womb, and the midwife helping to deliver the child.

Once upon a time, I was in labor. And it was, indeed, labor: childbirth is hard work. I wrote down Greta’s birth story when she was ten days old, and now when I read over it I cry and I laugh. I cry not because I remember the pain, but because I remember the power and the joy. I laugh because I wrote the words “I pushed,” more than two dozen times. It was the only time during my labor when I wanted to give up. I told everyone in the room – Marc, our doula, our midwife – I told them, “I can’t do this.” They all said, “Yes, you can.” They knew how close that baby was, even when I didn’t. So I believed them. I didn’t give up. “Push!” they said. “Your baby is almost here!” I pushed. And pushed. And pushed. And finally, after what felt like days of pushing but was in fact 45 minutes, I gave one last almighty push and the midwife held up a newborn: a new person had entered the world.

Small wonder that the prophets repeatedly use the laboring woman as an image of distress: the laboring woman is in agony, and I use the word “agony” because it denotes not just physical pain, but physical struggle. This may seem odd to you, but the laboring woman doesn’t always remember that a baby is on its way; she needs to be reminded by her birth-partners that her suffering is purposeful. This is what Jesus is doing for his disciples in John 16: he is reminding them that their labor is going somewhere. Jesus puts the disciples’ suffering in the context of a larger story – one that has a joyous conclusion: their pain and grief are real and fearsome things, but they are not forever and the story does not end in suffering. The story ends in wonderful joy.

Furthermore, Jesus tells his disciples that even when he goes away, the compassion of God persists; Jesus tells them to make their requests to God the Father directly, to ask using Jesus’ own name. God is still suffering with us – that is the root of the word “compassion”: “pati,” to suffer, and “cum,” with: to suffer with. Jesus is Immanuel, God-with-Us, God who sees the suffering of creation and is moved to compassion.

We are the woman in labor. We are suffering, and though it may seem that that is the whole of our story, our suffering is in fact a part of the larger story God is telling: our suffering is the labor pains of birthing a new creation. And though we are suffering, we are not suffering alone because our God is compassionate. God-with-Us suffers with us.

The Hebrew word for “compassion” is “rachamim,” which refers to the Womb of God. God suffers with us in the deepest, most intimate place of God’s being. God’s relationship with us is that of a mother carrying a child in her womb; a relationship of intimate care, and also of intimate mystery. After all, how can two individuals be closer than when one is wholly enveloped by the other? Yet the child in utero cannot perceive the whole of the mother’s being – only the warm darkness of her womb and the pulsing, rushing sound of the blood in her veins. The mother cannot be more present to the child, but the child cannot see her face or hear her voice clearly.

We are the children in the womb, communing with God our Mother by taking our nourishment from Jesus’ own body and blood. And as children in the womb, we feel God’s presence in part even though we cannot comprehend God’s being wholly.

One way we experience God’s presence is in the presence of others who can tell and re-tell the story—the whole story—and stand in solidarity with us while we endure our pain and agony. We gather in church to remind one other of God’s story of redemption and of the peaceable Kingdom we are laboring to bring forth. We show compassion by walking with each other through painful times, times of disappointment and confusion and frustration, sorrow and physical anguish and heartache.

In this way we partner with God and with each other and act as spiritual midwives, aiding the creation suffering from the pains of labor. This is the hope we have to share with the world, the love we compassionately communicate to the broken, exhausted, groaning world—our presence, our entering-in as Christ entered in and became God-with-Us. And because of our hope in the story God is telling, we cry out to the world, “Push! Your baby is almost here!”

Our time together during the Lenten season has been focused around the theme of thankfulness. As the woman in labor, we are thankful for the presence of God who suffers with us and the compassion of God in others who stand with us in our agony so that we do not struggle alone. As the child in the womb, we are thankful for the presence of God our Mother who nourishes, sustains, and grows us. As the midwives, we are thankful for God who assures us that the story is larger than the pain and who invites us to join as partners in bringing forth the Kingdom of God.

This is Palm Sunday, the commencement of Passion Week. This is the week of Christ’s agony, of the disciples’ anguish, of the world’s sorrow that the Messiah who came into the world was rejected utterly. The Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem is the water breaking – now the labor begins, no turning back. But Christ has made us midwives, partners in the birth of the New Creation, and we have a glimpse of the end of the story. We know that the suffering is not the whole of the story; we know that Christ is the first of many to be resurrected, and that our present painful, difficult work is the labor of God in the Old Creation giving birth to the New. And we know that when that joy comes to us, we will rejoice indeed, and no one can rob us of that joy.

Off on an adventure.

A few weeks ago, my husband and I moved into the house we’ll be renting through May of next year. He’s working at a small liberal arts college (his office is a mile from our doorstep) and I’m staying at home with our small daughter.

I’ve been a stay-at-home-something for two, non-consecutive years previous to this one: the first time was when my husband and I moved to our little town and I spent a year mostly at home, but also taking care of other people’s children and cleaning other people’s houses. Then I stayed home again when my daughter was born, this time taking care of my own child and (occasionally) cleaning my own house.

I decided to blog as a way to 1) share some of my writing and maybe get some feedback from readers; and 2) to stave off the intellectual and creative loneliness that has been present in my previous years as a stay-at-homer, and which I imagine will be a danger this time, too. Essentially, I’d like to cultivate a habit of creativity and to do that with an audience, or better yet, a community.

One last thing I’ll mention is that my posts won’t be strictly from the writing I’m doing during my present stay-at-home year. I wrote some things in previous years at home, and I’ll post some of that; I wrote some things while I was working, too, and I’ll post that, as well. If I wrote something before July '13, I'll mention it in the head notes.

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you visit again!

The Other Thing That Money Can't Buy

Lately I've been growing impatient waiting for sweet corn and cherry tomatoes to appear at my favorite local farm stand. I wrote this piece four years ago, and it reminds me why summer's harvest is worth the wait. 

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On the table before me are the last of this summer’s cherry tomatoes. The end of September is about the latest one can expect to harvest tomatoes in my climate, and there is simply no way to preserve the taste and texture of a sun-ripened cherry tomato: the way the seeds squirt out and the tomato-y goodness bursts on your tongue before you chew it up and pop another one in your mouth – and the fact that cherry tomatoes can be popped in your mouth to begin with.

Certainly I enjoy the aesthetics of the wide variety of regular tomatoes – the deep bloodreds, hearty pinks, pure pale golds and vivid greens that show up at our late-summer farmers’ markets. Though I have been known to eat regular full-size tomatoes like apples, more often then not I prefer large tomatoes drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with cracked black pepper, or topped with sweet basil just picked from my garden, or perhaps with some strong and salty feta cheese scattered across the slices. I have always loved the taste of really good tomatoes, and when the tomatoes (finally) came into season this year, I could be heard humming Guy Clark’s song: “There’s only two things that money can’t buy, and that’s true love and homegrown tomatoes.” Raw or cooked, it’s hard to beat the tomato for flavor or versatility.

Tomatoes, too, have taken on a special significance for me since my husband and I began to eat locally (and therefore seasonally). As I mentioned earlier, the tomato enjoys only a brief tenure in my particular climatic zone. We wait patiently for the hot-weather crops—tomatoes, peppers, eggplants—and as soon as they ripen, it seems, the autumn blows in and freezes them green on the vine. Tomatoes signify the zenith of summer, put me in mind that the season will only wane so we must seize the days and dedicate ourselves to eating through as many pounds of tomatoes as humanly possible.

But the cherry tomato in particular lays claim to a special place in my heart. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of picking my neighbors’ cherry tomatoes, eating most on the spot and trotting home with the rest collected in the front of my shirt. What was it about these diminutive tomatoes that appealed to me—that they were child-sized? Or that I could harvest and consume them on the spot? Or that my parents did not limit my portions as with my other favorite food, chocolate? Whatever the reason, I never grew tired of picking and eating the cherry tomatoes, and our neighbors delighted in seeing a little girl enjoy the abundance of their garden.

Perhaps it is that cherry tomatoes grow in such abundance, clustering on their vines in spendthrift decadence. Picking sungolds for the first time this summer threw me into a kind of saintly ecstasy; the tomatoes were thick and ripe, it was clear to me at the time that I was experiencing a foretaste of heaven. Crouching by the staked vines, surveying the hundreds upon hundreds of ripe cherry tomatoes, a pure, childlike joy overtook me and my heart still swells at the memory of so much goodness growing right out of the earth beneath my feet. I’m surprised now that I did not then burst out in singing the doxology, or go dancing through the fields.

On every return trip from farmers’ markets or farm stands, my hand would reach for the pint of sungolds and they would be gone before I arrived at home. No matter: my husband doesn’t care for them. Since I firmly believe that any tomato not thoroughly savored is a tomato wasted, I have done next to nothing to encourage his tastes to change.

My family used to bestow the title “nature’s perfect food” on whatever edible item had taken our fancy at the moment. For me, cherry tomatoes are and ever shall be nature’s perfect food. They are mouthwateringly sweet and endearingly small. They need no preparation nor accompaniment to make them palatable or interesting. They are prefect just the way they are.