A friend recently sent me an email with the subject line: Where is God? Help me on this one please. She then gave details of a friend who was drowning in pain over multiple and what seemed to her serial losses—all tragic and all related to alcohol dependency.
I wanted to preach 12-step recovery wisdom; instead I went for Christian wisdom and wrote.......
You of course are asking the $64-billion question theology has wrestled with for all time. It's called theodicy. Where is God in these situations? Why do the innocent suffer? I tend to ask people what God they are wondering about. Usually it is the deity they expect to intervene for the good and to save. But few consider what salvation means beyond mere rescue.
We pray for a rescuer and often we get a lover, a God who accompanies us, strengthens us from within, loves us in the midst of all kinds of tragedies but does not FIX it. It seems unfair I know but think about the fact that if God fixed everything for us we would never grow up and we would never access the enormous capacity God gave us to love one another, just as you are doing for your sweet friend.
With such a God we might feel cozy or spoiled but would be dependent and not free. (Think Alanon.) YOU are the presence of God to her as you listen, advise when you can, and mostly just be present gently until she grieves and begins to heal. (A good book on this question is Rabbi Kushner's "When Bad Things Happen to Good People." )
God to me is a compassionate presence not a judge, a cosmic controller, or a rescuer—except through us. My nephew for example has been rescued many many time by the Salvation Army. The rest of his salvation is transformation and it's is up to him and God.
If God were to prevent or eliminate evil & suffering She would have done it for Jesus at the very least. Jesus spread good and healing around but he didn't heal everyone and God didn't stop the crucifixion but simply acted to restore Life in the Spirit forever, which Christians call resurrection.
God limits God's own powers for the sake of love—and for the sake of our freedom, including nature's.
Theologian William Pocher Dubose said something I remember: "God's will waits upon our willingness."
Demond Tutu, retired Anglican Archbishop of So. Africa said, "God without us will not, and we without God cannot ." Yup! Relationship/partnership/cocreatorship— not control is the way this kingdom is run.
I believe that God created us imperfect AND perfectly driven to yearn, strive, struggle, and question life as it comes. It's just that way. The amazing grace, when we can be aware, is that we recognize serenity in patches—patches so colorful and enchanting (and often nuts) that they remain embroidered on our souls forever and help us go on, no matter what.
Be the amazing grace, and I send you grit and prayers, and hope,
Lyn
P.S. It's OK too to rant and get mad at God who will listen, not condemn, and let you work through your powerlessness…. and God's as well :)
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
2012.06.06 What Does It Matter?
What does it matter when someone at a geographic distance, that you haven’t seen in 30 years and only glimpsed at a reunion, and with whom you have no personal connection but whose work you admire and whose ministry touched you once for a very short time, gets hurt unjustly?
Margaret Farley, RSM (Sister of Mercy, an order in which I am an Associate member) was one of my favorite professors when I was in seminary at Yale Divinity School in the early 80s. She taught Ethics. The church required aspiring clergy to take Ethics. I thought I was ethical. What did I know?
I remember Margaret’s generous spirit, her scholarship, considerable and accessible, and her wry grin. She is a faithful woman who has been subjected to three years of intensive interrogation from her church hierarchy and has had to defend her perspectives and scholarship over and over, only to be told her work is condemned because it runs counter to official Roman Catholic moral teaching.
Margaret’s view of the Gospel of Jesus Christ was always broad and deep. Now she is being persecuted, not by her Order but by the Vatican whose Gospel values to me seem shallow and narrow, an institution quite closed in on itself by fear, and rife with its own corruptions. Implosive I’d say.
Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, a book Margaret has worked on over years and a compendium of much of her thinking on the radical topic of LOVE has made it to the condemned list of the Congregation for the Defense of the Faith (CDF) because it contradicts Catholic moral teachings on matters of, what else, sex—the usual culprits, divorce and remarriage, homosexual sex, and, my favorite, masturbation, an activity the magisterium finds “an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.” Margaret suggest such an activity may improve marital relations, may enhance and equilibrate differences.
So how do you screen for masturbatory activity? Who would know but God? What precisely makes it unethical? (I remember my first time. I experienced bodily power I never knew I had; it helped me love the body someone else had abused and I had shamed and it helped my marriage.)
JUST LOVE is a wily and provocative title. It can mean just love as if love alone made the world go round and was all you needed; or it can mean that all love must be just. Knowing Margaret, even without reading this book, I’d vote for the latter interpretation. I’d bet that couples, friends, peers and colleagues, or most people who say they love someone or a group, a pet, nature’s beauties, or a cherished idea, don’t think of justice as an ethical boundary that must surround their affections.
We think of justice more as a social category than a personal intimate one, but justice is the framework that supports love, both erotic and platonic, and allows it to grow.
The official Notification that Just Love may not be used in any Catholic institutions even for ecumenical discussion is deliciously ironic. Farley is a professor emeritus at Yale Divinity School, not a Catholic institution, and even more the recent censure has sent this book’s sales soaring.
Academic Catholic colleagues are weighing in with vigor in defense of Margaret's scholarly rights and in admiration of her person. I wish some Anglo-Catholic bishops would speak out. I suppose they are worried about damaging ecumenical relations, but this is about solidarity not politics.
Mercy’s leadership supports their sister and is helping her through this process while they are simultaneously defending themselves after vatican crackdowns for doctrinal offenses and serious feminist leanings ( more on sex and women) that threaten the same hierarchy, itself profoundly disordered by its own sexual scandals and coverups. Its a mess. And why is everything conflictual always about money or sex?
Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister minces no words. “Where has all this energy for empirical destruction come from in a church now projecting its own serious problems with sexual issues onto everything that moves?”
You can read all about it online, with the help of Google/God of course. Start with the Sisters of Mercy website, Margaret Farley, Yale Divinity School, even Huffington Post, and click along the links.
Why does it matter to me? It matters because I am a woman, an Associate of Mercy, a former student of Margaret Farley, a member of the body of Christ wounded. It matters because anything that hurts one of us hurts all of us, no matter who or where we are.
Most of all it matters because it hurts God, the divine spiritual presence whose graciousness wraps us round with a love at once intimate and impotent, a love that waits upon human cooperation to create “JUST LOVE,” both political and personal. Freedom, God’s loving gift, is valueless and serves no higher purpose, without justice to give it breath.
What I remember most of all the wisdom Margaret Farley imparted is something she told us about Peter and Judas, the polarized hero/villain team of the Christian drama. She noted this paradox: Peter—the favored one, the rock of the Church, the “pope,” leader and most faithful of all— in the end discovered he had little faith, little enough to betray all of it thrice.
While Judas, the identified betrayer— condemned, cast off, placed outside the inner sacred circle of the faithful forever— discovered in the end that he had true faith, enough to die for its sake.
How timely!
Margaret Farley, RSM (Sister of Mercy, an order in which I am an Associate member) was one of my favorite professors when I was in seminary at Yale Divinity School in the early 80s. She taught Ethics. The church required aspiring clergy to take Ethics. I thought I was ethical. What did I know?
I remember Margaret’s generous spirit, her scholarship, considerable and accessible, and her wry grin. She is a faithful woman who has been subjected to three years of intensive interrogation from her church hierarchy and has had to defend her perspectives and scholarship over and over, only to be told her work is condemned because it runs counter to official Roman Catholic moral teaching.
Margaret’s view of the Gospel of Jesus Christ was always broad and deep. Now she is being persecuted, not by her Order but by the Vatican whose Gospel values to me seem shallow and narrow, an institution quite closed in on itself by fear, and rife with its own corruptions. Implosive I’d say.
Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, a book Margaret has worked on over years and a compendium of much of her thinking on the radical topic of LOVE has made it to the condemned list of the Congregation for the Defense of the Faith (CDF) because it contradicts Catholic moral teachings on matters of, what else, sex—the usual culprits, divorce and remarriage, homosexual sex, and, my favorite, masturbation, an activity the magisterium finds “an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.” Margaret suggest such an activity may improve marital relations, may enhance and equilibrate differences.
So how do you screen for masturbatory activity? Who would know but God? What precisely makes it unethical? (I remember my first time. I experienced bodily power I never knew I had; it helped me love the body someone else had abused and I had shamed and it helped my marriage.)
JUST LOVE is a wily and provocative title. It can mean just love as if love alone made the world go round and was all you needed; or it can mean that all love must be just. Knowing Margaret, even without reading this book, I’d vote for the latter interpretation. I’d bet that couples, friends, peers and colleagues, or most people who say they love someone or a group, a pet, nature’s beauties, or a cherished idea, don’t think of justice as an ethical boundary that must surround their affections.
We think of justice more as a social category than a personal intimate one, but justice is the framework that supports love, both erotic and platonic, and allows it to grow.
The official Notification that Just Love may not be used in any Catholic institutions even for ecumenical discussion is deliciously ironic. Farley is a professor emeritus at Yale Divinity School, not a Catholic institution, and even more the recent censure has sent this book’s sales soaring.
Academic Catholic colleagues are weighing in with vigor in defense of Margaret's scholarly rights and in admiration of her person. I wish some Anglo-Catholic bishops would speak out. I suppose they are worried about damaging ecumenical relations, but this is about solidarity not politics.
Mercy’s leadership supports their sister and is helping her through this process while they are simultaneously defending themselves after vatican crackdowns for doctrinal offenses and serious feminist leanings ( more on sex and women) that threaten the same hierarchy, itself profoundly disordered by its own sexual scandals and coverups. Its a mess. And why is everything conflictual always about money or sex?
Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister minces no words. “Where has all this energy for empirical destruction come from in a church now projecting its own serious problems with sexual issues onto everything that moves?”
You can read all about it online, with the help of Google/God of course. Start with the Sisters of Mercy website, Margaret Farley, Yale Divinity School, even Huffington Post, and click along the links.
Why does it matter to me? It matters because I am a woman, an Associate of Mercy, a former student of Margaret Farley, a member of the body of Christ wounded. It matters because anything that hurts one of us hurts all of us, no matter who or where we are.
Most of all it matters because it hurts God, the divine spiritual presence whose graciousness wraps us round with a love at once intimate and impotent, a love that waits upon human cooperation to create “JUST LOVE,” both political and personal. Freedom, God’s loving gift, is valueless and serves no higher purpose, without justice to give it breath.
What I remember most of all the wisdom Margaret Farley imparted is something she told us about Peter and Judas, the polarized hero/villain team of the Christian drama. She noted this paradox: Peter—the favored one, the rock of the Church, the “pope,” leader and most faithful of all— in the end discovered he had little faith, little enough to betray all of it thrice.
While Judas, the identified betrayer— condemned, cast off, placed outside the inner sacred circle of the faithful forever— discovered in the end that he had true faith, enough to die for its sake.
How timely!
Sunday, June 3, 2012
2012.06.03 God Grows and Grows: How I Learned the Trinity
I’d seen pictures of God in my favorite book The Little Book About God, published just two years before I was born by Doubleday. God was an old man reclining on a cloud creating myriad wonders on earth below—His Earth. I was impressed by the Creation thing, but what grabbed me by the scruff of my soul was God’s odd personality quirk—listening.
God would sit for hours in a garden and listen to all the sounds of Earth, identifying and cataloguing every single sound, including “weeny sounds” like the soft weeping of a little girl, a sound so small it was “very hard to locate.” But God found it.
I had a difficult time when my grandmother moved into our small NewYork apartment with us and the dining room became the only place for her bed. She had bad ears. Mastoiditis they said. No wonder she had bad ears. I could see they were too long, hanging down all along her cheeks. I resented her ears. It was because of them that she needed care and moved in so my dining room table sanctuary moved out. God, to me, lived under that table. Where would God live now?
I sucked my thumb double time and raw and my pout deepened as I grieved my table and re-thunk God. While I wondered I still talked to God who listened, table or no table.
That was how I learned that God must be intimately a part of my own spiritually charged imagination and didn’t dwell solely there any more than God dwelt under my table.
God got around. God lived nowhere and everywhere. God lived in me and in you, not just in Jesus like the church said. God was free.
My experience and the images it generated helped me digest what the church calls the Holy Trinity, whose Sunday it is today, because it made God plural, deeply relational, mobile and multiform, read, less patriarchal uber-MAN in the sky, and decidedly un-housable.
God would sit for hours in a garden and listen to all the sounds of Earth, identifying and cataloguing every single sound, including “weeny sounds” like the soft weeping of a little girl, a sound so small it was “very hard to locate.” But God found it.
I had a difficult time when my grandmother moved into our small NewYork apartment with us and the dining room became the only place for her bed. She had bad ears. Mastoiditis they said. No wonder she had bad ears. I could see they were too long, hanging down all along her cheeks. I resented her ears. It was because of them that she needed care and moved in so my dining room table sanctuary moved out. God, to me, lived under that table. Where would God live now?
I sucked my thumb double time and raw and my pout deepened as I grieved my table and re-thunk God. While I wondered I still talked to God who listened, table or no table.
That was how I learned that God must be intimately a part of my own spiritually charged imagination and didn’t dwell solely there any more than God dwelt under my table.
God got around. God lived nowhere and everywhere. God lived in me and in you, not just in Jesus like the church said. God was free.
My experience and the images it generated helped me digest what the church calls the Holy Trinity, whose Sunday it is today, because it made God plural, deeply relational, mobile and multiform, read, less patriarchal uber-MAN in the sky, and decidedly un-housable.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
2012.05.30 Necessary Drunkenness?
One of the scornful accusations leveled at the people in the pentecostal parable in the New Testament, in which hundreds went ecstatic and spoke and understood in many languages, was that these religious nuts were drunk!
Excuses were quickly made by Peter: “No, no they can’t be drunk. It’s only 9 a.m.!” When that story is read in church everyone usually laughs— out loud.
I’ve often made excuses about my spiritual experience, even though I’m not the ecstasy type. Anglo/WASP/New England, you know.
Not long ago we went to New York's Museum of Modern Art to see a special exhibit featuring Willem deKooning’s paintings of Woman and a major work, Excavation, his largest painting up to 1950.
We liked Excavation but found it somewhat colorless, drab, and overly gray. I felt guilty. This man was acclaimed. I remembered liking his work somewhere in my own ancient history, like college. Maybe it was because we were getting old and graying ourselves.
As we moved through the exhibit the paintings took on more color, flamboyance. And more abstraction. Nary a nose or a big eye to let you know there was supposed to be a person—and no outsized nippled breasts either!
And we loved it!
Later I told an artist friend we’d been a bit disappointed by the work that had been touted as his best. She gave a wry snort and said something like “Well, the colorful stuff was painted when he was drinking more and more.” We laughed.
“Hey,” I told Dick. “The de Kooning stuff we liked the best was his alkie stuff!”
Of course I know sobriety is a better bet, but there’s a reason why the Bible remembers the grandiose biblical story of collective spiritual ecstasy at Pentecost. It wasn’t the first appearance of Spirit but this one was a big splash—rushing winds, tongues of fire. They were speaking about God and God’s mighty deeds so I suppose anything could happen—and it did.
Peter’s attempt to explain it away, but certainly not as morning-after “drunkenness,” was funny.
About as funny as our preferring the alcohol-inspired work of a great artist.
I think everyone is an alcoholic at some level and some time, or at least we all go through necessary drunkenness to break into the divine outer, even for just a day or a minute or for the sake of a couple of blow-out paintings.
Excuses were quickly made by Peter: “No, no they can’t be drunk. It’s only 9 a.m.!” When that story is read in church everyone usually laughs— out loud.
I’ve often made excuses about my spiritual experience, even though I’m not the ecstasy type. Anglo/WASP/New England, you know.
Not long ago we went to New York's Museum of Modern Art to see a special exhibit featuring Willem deKooning’s paintings of Woman and a major work, Excavation, his largest painting up to 1950.
We liked Excavation but found it somewhat colorless, drab, and overly gray. I felt guilty. This man was acclaimed. I remembered liking his work somewhere in my own ancient history, like college. Maybe it was because we were getting old and graying ourselves.
As we moved through the exhibit the paintings took on more color, flamboyance. And more abstraction. Nary a nose or a big eye to let you know there was supposed to be a person—and no outsized nippled breasts either!
And we loved it!
Later I told an artist friend we’d been a bit disappointed by the work that had been touted as his best. She gave a wry snort and said something like “Well, the colorful stuff was painted when he was drinking more and more.” We laughed.
“Hey,” I told Dick. “The de Kooning stuff we liked the best was his alkie stuff!”
Of course I know sobriety is a better bet, but there’s a reason why the Bible remembers the grandiose biblical story of collective spiritual ecstasy at Pentecost. It wasn’t the first appearance of Spirit but this one was a big splash—rushing winds, tongues of fire. They were speaking about God and God’s mighty deeds so I suppose anything could happen—and it did.
Peter’s attempt to explain it away, but certainly not as morning-after “drunkenness,” was funny.
About as funny as our preferring the alcohol-inspired work of a great artist.
I think everyone is an alcoholic at some level and some time, or at least we all go through necessary drunkenness to break into the divine outer, even for just a day or a minute or for the sake of a couple of blow-out paintings.
Sunday, May 27, 2012
2012.05.27 Darling, It's Pentecost!
My parents used to call each other “darling” all the time. I suppose each generation has its own terms of endearment. Ours tends towards “Hon,” or others too fierce to mention :) One of my sons slipped and called me “Babe” once—what he calls his wife, and she him. “Sweets” is another favorite. And I also like “Sweetie darling.” I picked that one up on the media.
My former French Jesuit spiritual director used to suggest that we use terms of intimacy for Godde. I chose Beloved. But I think Darling would work for the Holy Spirit, that expression of divine affection who is mobile, planting seeds of love, healing, and connecting all hearts for goodness’ sake.
That's what Pentecost celebrates, the intimate affectionate travelocity of Godde. (I mean what good is a deity who doesn't get around?) The season of the Spirit is the longest one of the Christian church year.
I wrote a book about this Spirit called The God Between Us. But I think another good title would be, “Here I Am, Darling.”
A propos of darling, I read this story in the British actor Judi Dench's memoir "and furthermore." She writes of a time when she, as a very young (early 20s) Shakespearean actor, was given the part of Juliet in R & J. They played it at the Old Vic in London and her parents came to every performance, in fact came to all of her performances. Judi as Juliet had a very poignant line in the context of feeling quite young and quite lost. She turned to her nurse and said, with great pathos, "Where are my parents, Nurse?" And her own father overcome by it all called out loudly, "Here we are, darling, in row H."
Good acting. Good dad. Good humor. Good Spirit.
Dench adds that people don't believe her when she tells this story and writes: "But I assure you it is quite true." Who could doubt?
Dontcha just love the Spirit!! What a darling Great Connector.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
2012.05.23 How Should Things Be? A God's Eye View.
How ya gonna live your dash? These words startled Fred Allen out of a breakdown and into a breakthrough. The dash is what falls between a birth date and a death date on one’s tombstone. The question has a flavor of the eternal in it.
Allen had been working as a member of a tie-down team in the death house of a Texas prison. His job was to make sure an inmate was securely strapped onto the gurney before a lethal injection was administered. The tie-down job could be compared with the ancient work of nailing down (securing) criminals to crucifixion crosses in ancient times. No one should have to such a thing.
Fred Allen had officiated at 125 executions until one day he strapped down a woman, the first to be thus executed, and something happened.
I heard Allen’s story in Werner Herzog’s documentary film, “Into the Abyss. A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life,” a film that chills and warms simultaneously a story fraught with contradictions.
Herzog, with skill and compassion, interviewed everyone affected by a violent crime in which three people were murdered. The crime had no defensible motive (stealing a car); it was perpetrated by young and undeveloped brains out of control; two 18 year old young men were found guilty; and it happened in a “gated” community.
I heard the voices of the murderers and their families, families of the victims, the prison chaplain, and law enforcement officials. Some years had passed but they spoke as if it were fresh though not emotionally immediate. Capital punishment is legal in Texas, but no state can afford to wear the self-righteous badge on this issue.
Herzog’s documentary, however, was not polemical. Rather it sought to unveil the inner story from the perspective of ALL the participants. It was like a play, each interview a scene, the script coming from the hearts of all of the principals who together made a whole story, a parable that challenges but does not tell you how to think or what exactly to do—like most biblical parables.
This drama of the human soul—territory of the unexpected—unfolded in uncanny and utterly unpredictable ways. Listening, I could almost get a God’s eye view into the spiritual innocence of the bared soul. I wondered if I could know God through what should happen or through what shouldn’t happen—or both?
Michael Perry, 28, was executed on July 1, 2010 for the murders. Perry’s co-defendant, Jason Burkett, in a separate trial, received a life sentence.
Was it a fluke or an injustice that Burkett got a lesser sentence than Perry? Shouldn’t he too have been executed? Perhaps, but his life was spared because of the not too late confessional testimony of his father. With uncharacteristic humility, Des Burkett, a hardened criminal softened. From prison he spoke of his own criminality and lifelong drug addiction. His son never had a chance at a life, he said, because he never had a father. Two women jurors wept.
What if we could interview all the players in Jesus’ execution trials:Pilate, Pilate’s wife, Herod, Peter, Mary, Barabbas, crowds? What if we could get the inside story? We try feebly but we really can’t explain it forensically. But Jesus had a father, too, a spiritual one by whom he felt abandoned and to whom he cried out. Like Burkett’s earthly father, Jesus’ Heavenly Father intervened to make sure His son didn’t die forever —as intended. Should he never have died, or should he never have been raised? Mary Magdalene wept.
Its easy to say I’m against capital punishment. It’s not easy to see the issue made flesh. I couldn’t play either/or. Morality went out the window. I had to participate in a God’s eye view‚ even though I should have felt disgust, shouldn’t have felt empathy with “bad guys” when my heart had melted listening to the grief of the woman who had lost her mother and her brother, “my whole family in one fell swoop.”
At one point Herzog, joshed with Perry about fate and faith, allowing as how the Old Testament would have been in favor of capital punishment, but Jesus probably wouldn’t have favored it, right? He fed Perry his line and split divinity in half—a serious theological error that should have been cut. Still, it was endearing. The interview must have been difficult for Herzog, too.
Michael Perry, dark-haired, young, handsome, leaned into his words. He was mere days away from death yet he spoke with hope. “Ya never know,” he said with a shrug and a smile. He wasn’t a monster, simply a child. I’d never been able to separate the sinner from the sin, more than in my head, until seeing this film.
At the end Perry said his last words: "I want to let everyone here who is involved in this atrocity know they're forgiven by me.” Was he trying to emulate Jesus? Who should be forgiving and who forgiven? He sobbed briefly, mouthed "I love you" to his mother, and twice whispered, "I'm coming home, Dad." I don’t know if he meant God or his absent father.
The lethal injection took nine minutes.
Fred Allen strapped and watched. He had spent time with the death row inmates, most of them men. He had provided amenities, like a solicitous mother. He took orders, served a last meal, maybe chatted. He made sure they were clean and dressed in their own clothes, no prison garb. Then he escorted them to their death. It was his job; it provided a fine pension. He should do his civic duty.
Nevertheless, when Allen had to strap a woman he soon broke down. The woman had been calm, accepting. Allen shook and sobbed convulsively. This shouldn’t happen to a woman.
“I just couldn’t control myself at all,” he said. “This thought came to me, how ya gonna live your dash? I’m gonna stand still and watch the birds. How come there are so many humming birds? Ever notice?”
Fred Allen retired early—and forfeited his entire pension.
Jason Burkett is serving his second 30 year sentence. He married in prison and his wife is now pregnant even though they were never allowed to touch each other. Parthenogenesis or sperm as contraband? Burkett will soon be a father.
How ya gonna live your dash? How should ya?
Allen had been working as a member of a tie-down team in the death house of a Texas prison. His job was to make sure an inmate was securely strapped onto the gurney before a lethal injection was administered. The tie-down job could be compared with the ancient work of nailing down (securing) criminals to crucifixion crosses in ancient times. No one should have to such a thing.
Fred Allen had officiated at 125 executions until one day he strapped down a woman, the first to be thus executed, and something happened.
I heard Allen’s story in Werner Herzog’s documentary film, “Into the Abyss. A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life,” a film that chills and warms simultaneously a story fraught with contradictions.
Herzog, with skill and compassion, interviewed everyone affected by a violent crime in which three people were murdered. The crime had no defensible motive (stealing a car); it was perpetrated by young and undeveloped brains out of control; two 18 year old young men were found guilty; and it happened in a “gated” community.
I heard the voices of the murderers and their families, families of the victims, the prison chaplain, and law enforcement officials. Some years had passed but they spoke as if it were fresh though not emotionally immediate. Capital punishment is legal in Texas, but no state can afford to wear the self-righteous badge on this issue.
Herzog’s documentary, however, was not polemical. Rather it sought to unveil the inner story from the perspective of ALL the participants. It was like a play, each interview a scene, the script coming from the hearts of all of the principals who together made a whole story, a parable that challenges but does not tell you how to think or what exactly to do—like most biblical parables.
This drama of the human soul—territory of the unexpected—unfolded in uncanny and utterly unpredictable ways. Listening, I could almost get a God’s eye view into the spiritual innocence of the bared soul. I wondered if I could know God through what should happen or through what shouldn’t happen—or both?
Michael Perry, 28, was executed on July 1, 2010 for the murders. Perry’s co-defendant, Jason Burkett, in a separate trial, received a life sentence.
Was it a fluke or an injustice that Burkett got a lesser sentence than Perry? Shouldn’t he too have been executed? Perhaps, but his life was spared because of the not too late confessional testimony of his father. With uncharacteristic humility, Des Burkett, a hardened criminal softened. From prison he spoke of his own criminality and lifelong drug addiction. His son never had a chance at a life, he said, because he never had a father. Two women jurors wept.
What if we could interview all the players in Jesus’ execution trials:Pilate, Pilate’s wife, Herod, Peter, Mary, Barabbas, crowds? What if we could get the inside story? We try feebly but we really can’t explain it forensically. But Jesus had a father, too, a spiritual one by whom he felt abandoned and to whom he cried out. Like Burkett’s earthly father, Jesus’ Heavenly Father intervened to make sure His son didn’t die forever —as intended. Should he never have died, or should he never have been raised? Mary Magdalene wept.
Its easy to say I’m against capital punishment. It’s not easy to see the issue made flesh. I couldn’t play either/or. Morality went out the window. I had to participate in a God’s eye view‚ even though I should have felt disgust, shouldn’t have felt empathy with “bad guys” when my heart had melted listening to the grief of the woman who had lost her mother and her brother, “my whole family in one fell swoop.”
At one point Herzog, joshed with Perry about fate and faith, allowing as how the Old Testament would have been in favor of capital punishment, but Jesus probably wouldn’t have favored it, right? He fed Perry his line and split divinity in half—a serious theological error that should have been cut. Still, it was endearing. The interview must have been difficult for Herzog, too.
Michael Perry, dark-haired, young, handsome, leaned into his words. He was mere days away from death yet he spoke with hope. “Ya never know,” he said with a shrug and a smile. He wasn’t a monster, simply a child. I’d never been able to separate the sinner from the sin, more than in my head, until seeing this film.
At the end Perry said his last words: "I want to let everyone here who is involved in this atrocity know they're forgiven by me.” Was he trying to emulate Jesus? Who should be forgiving and who forgiven? He sobbed briefly, mouthed "I love you" to his mother, and twice whispered, "I'm coming home, Dad." I don’t know if he meant God or his absent father.
The lethal injection took nine minutes.
Fred Allen strapped and watched. He had spent time with the death row inmates, most of them men. He had provided amenities, like a solicitous mother. He took orders, served a last meal, maybe chatted. He made sure they were clean and dressed in their own clothes, no prison garb. Then he escorted them to their death. It was his job; it provided a fine pension. He should do his civic duty.
Nevertheless, when Allen had to strap a woman he soon broke down. The woman had been calm, accepting. Allen shook and sobbed convulsively. This shouldn’t happen to a woman.
“I just couldn’t control myself at all,” he said. “This thought came to me, how ya gonna live your dash? I’m gonna stand still and watch the birds. How come there are so many humming birds? Ever notice?”
Fred Allen retired early—and forfeited his entire pension.
Jason Burkett is serving his second 30 year sentence. He married in prison and his wife is now pregnant even though they were never allowed to touch each other. Parthenogenesis or sperm as contraband? Burkett will soon be a father.
How ya gonna live your dash? How should ya?
Sunday, May 20, 2012
2012.05.20 To Outline Or Not To Outline?
I read a blog recently by Susan Oleksiew, a writer of good mystery books, who wrote that she’d rather have a root canal than make an outline for her writing. Yes!
Most writers and teachers of writing suggest outlining one’s work as a guide. It’s a good idea—and sane. And it drives me crazy.
But I can NOT outline to save my soul and have worried whether this is resistance or just plain ineptitude. Maybe I'm afraid I'll get enslaved to my outline. I need to know I can riff at will, then edit later. It's just how I approach writing.
I will say that an outline of sorts emerges through the writing itself rather than the reverse. Perhaps I’m a backwards writer. Oleksiew calls this writing in the moment.
Oddly this approach stands in contrast to how I prepare for a workshop, a sermon, or a talk for example. I prepare and prepare and over-prepare even if I'm re-inventing the wheel and it's all stuff I know already and have spoken about before. I spend too much time on preparation. It’s a safety net against anxiety, going blank before an audience. Of course I can go blank before a blank page, too. But before an outline it’s worse: I freeze—and feel furious.
Outlines feel like girdles, those mini boa-constrictors women used to pour our flesh into to bind our bellies and inhibit out breathing. With a sermon I have it all on index cards—so neat. I read them over. Boring. Then I preach while I drive. Watching the road I can’t risk looking at notes. I preach until the sermon is in me, not on the cards. It grows its own wings. What hearers derive isn’t up to me.
Writing is organic like that. It grows as it goes. I follow more than lead. Sentence by sentence I become its disciple. It takes off. Time stops. When I return to it I’m not sure exactly what I’ve done but I know it has its own life. Revisions don’t give it life, just keep it alive—and ungirdled.
In the words of noted German contemporary painter Charline Von Heyl (b. 1960): “It is about the feeling that a painter, or any work of art, can give—when you stop looking because there is something that you want to find out, that you want to understand . . . good paintings have this tantalizing quality. And once you turn around, you absolutely cannot recapture them. They leave a hole in the mind, a longing.”
It occurs to me that God Creator worked not by outline but maybe like artist Jackson Pollack, splashing and smattering colors and critters around all over the cosmic canvas. Some outline!
But, how else do you think the earth got so wildly colorful, varied, totally, erotically unmanageable—and easterish?
Most writers and teachers of writing suggest outlining one’s work as a guide. It’s a good idea—and sane. And it drives me crazy.
But I can NOT outline to save my soul and have worried whether this is resistance or just plain ineptitude. Maybe I'm afraid I'll get enslaved to my outline. I need to know I can riff at will, then edit later. It's just how I approach writing.
I will say that an outline of sorts emerges through the writing itself rather than the reverse. Perhaps I’m a backwards writer. Oleksiew calls this writing in the moment.
Oddly this approach stands in contrast to how I prepare for a workshop, a sermon, or a talk for example. I prepare and prepare and over-prepare even if I'm re-inventing the wheel and it's all stuff I know already and have spoken about before. I spend too much time on preparation. It’s a safety net against anxiety, going blank before an audience. Of course I can go blank before a blank page, too. But before an outline it’s worse: I freeze—and feel furious.
Outlines feel like girdles, those mini boa-constrictors women used to pour our flesh into to bind our bellies and inhibit out breathing. With a sermon I have it all on index cards—so neat. I read them over. Boring. Then I preach while I drive. Watching the road I can’t risk looking at notes. I preach until the sermon is in me, not on the cards. It grows its own wings. What hearers derive isn’t up to me.
Writing is organic like that. It grows as it goes. I follow more than lead. Sentence by sentence I become its disciple. It takes off. Time stops. When I return to it I’m not sure exactly what I’ve done but I know it has its own life. Revisions don’t give it life, just keep it alive—and ungirdled.
In the words of noted German contemporary painter Charline Von Heyl (b. 1960): “It is about the feeling that a painter, or any work of art, can give—when you stop looking because there is something that you want to find out, that you want to understand . . . good paintings have this tantalizing quality. And once you turn around, you absolutely cannot recapture them. They leave a hole in the mind, a longing.”
It occurs to me that God Creator worked not by outline but maybe like artist Jackson Pollack, splashing and smattering colors and critters around all over the cosmic canvas. Some outline!
But, how else do you think the earth got so wildly colorful, varied, totally, erotically unmanageable—and easterish?
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