“Questions that tap into our mortality, our pain, our selfishness, our basic needs, questions that arise from the immeasurable darkness, light, or mystery of our lives, require more than Answerization. They require our suffering, steadfastness, silent yearning, and deepest faith.”
Amen
I’m currently on the search for a good book or two on the topic of sexuality and/or sexology. The discussions of the last few posts have been wonderful, and I’d love to broaden my knowledge on these things, benefitting from folks who have given entire careers to studying and contemplating them.
So…please feel free to offer suggestions. I’d love to find a book that gives an overview of perspectives on sex and sexuality that have been held through time - maybe something sociological? anthropological? Jenell (or anyone else…) - anything from your teaching or studies come to mind? I’d love the book/s to be current, too, as things even 5 or 10 years old can be based on outdated research.
Once I settle on a book or two, I’ll let you know the titles so that if anyone else is interested in reading them at the same time and discussing them, we can do that too.
A few weeks ago I got an invitation from The Triad Institute, via Adam Walker Cleaveland, to read and review David James Duncan’s latest book. I didn’t read the invitation closely enough, however, to see that the book was called God Laughs and Plays, and had both “sermons” and “fundamentalist right” in the subtitle. I thought I was signing up to read a novel. Since Christians and I don’t generally use “God” to refer to the same thing, and since sermons and fundamentalists continue to be things I mostly try to avoid, you can imagine my horror, some days later, when the book arrives and I see the cover alone contains all three! Ack!
Luckily I looked closer this time. The real title reads God Laughs and Plays: Churchless Sermons In Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right.
Now, we can argue about whether the title accurately sums up the book, or whether I will ever get totally comfortable with it, but we can’t about this: I just sat here weeping after reading the whole thing through. I cried the kind of tears you only do when some deep, deep need you didn’t even know existed in you gets offered to you gently, lovingly, on the very platter that the grandma you’ve only ever dreamed of having owns—the one on which your imaginative matriarch of all-will-be-well serves you up cobbler and roast beef and sweet rolls and every kind of homemade Christmas treat. The one the mere glimpse of which reminds you, despite all evidence to the contrary, that you’ve always belonged somewhere, nestled deep into a clan, and that words like slick and posh and edgy and cool don’t apply here, never have, and therefore cannot touch your sense of being fine and loved and safe and known, all the way to your core. Normal, even.
He served me up these things, this David Duncan, middle-aged, writer-activist-comic-mystic-angler that apparently he is.
God Laughs and Plays is a collection of essays. It’s taken from talks, interviews and writings from Duncan’s recent past, and together is a kind of No! to any worldview—fundamentalist or otherwise—that would flatten or feign capable of stuffing our world into known and owned and heavily controlled commodities, things separate from holy, and therefore freely trampleable and disposable and looked past for finding God. It’s a Yes! to anything that expands wonder, which is to say love. Duncan writes:
Wonder is my second favorite condition to be in, after love—and I sometimes wonder whether there’s even a difference: maybe love is just wonder aimed at a beloved. Wonder is like grace, in that it’s not a condition we grasp: wonder grasps us. We do have the freedom to elude wonder’s grasp. We have the freedom to do all sorts of stupid things. By deploying cynicism, rationalism, fear, arrogance, judgmentalism, we can evade wonder nonstop, all our lives. I’m not too fond of that gnarly old word, sin, but the deliberate evasion of wonder does bring it to mind. It may not be biblically sinful to evade wonder, but it is artistically and spiritually sinful. (8)
So it’s a love letter to Life, you could say, in the deepest, all-encompassing sense of the word Life, and a mama-bear growl toward anything that would defame Her…that would defame God.
Lest you fear an embittered tirade of equal, though left-handed, barb to the kinds of rants the fundamentalist right can make, however, listen to what he says early on:
There is a self-righteous knot in me that finds zealotry so repugnant it wants to sit on the sidelines with the like-minded, plaster my car with bumper stickers that say MEAN PEOPLE SUCK and NO BILLIONAIRE LEFT BEHIND and WHO WOULD JESUS BOMB?, and leave it at that. But I can’t. My sense of this life as pure gift—my sense of a grace operative in this world despite, and even amid, its hurts and terrors—propels me to allow life to open my heart still wider, even if this openness comes by breaking. For I have seen the whole world fall into a few hearts, and nothing has ever struck me as more beautiful. (xxv)
This is the kind of heart you will find beating behind and inside of all the teeth this book can bare.
So what about this heart, and the brains and words and quirks attached to it? How did it serve me up such grounding, grandmotherly kindness?
Though my past might say otherwise, I am not religious. I am not a churchgoer. I confess that most religious people and places do little by way of opening my heart to God. They don’t expand my sense of wonder, to put it Duncanly. I am, however, deeply hungry to sense my (our) union with God. And I’m seized by this—by wonder, by love—as I ponder so many things: people, trees, planets, stars, nutrinos, animals, carpentry, music, color, the texture of almost anything I touch. I see things, too, with a deep, inner eye. Visions, if you want to call them that.
So I am a mystic, even as I’m hopelessly tethered to my rational, knowledge-based side.
And in all of this, in this crazy mix of rational and irrational…metarational; in my love of all things known and unknown and my thirst for ever more of them flowing into me; in the kinds of feelings and images evoked when they do; in the echoes of wisdom and truth I see and study across religious traditions, and my chafing at claims to the contrary, I have felt alien. There’s a stamp in the shape of woowoo spiritist and a stamp in the shape of religious adherent and a stamp in the shape of rational ponderer or crazy right-brained mystic, but none of these alone has ever fit my forehead well.
But along comes Duncan, whose book I blindly and then resistantly and then with gusto stumble into, and he’s speaking my language! He’s talking my talk! Were I born twenty years earlier, and in Montana, and raised by fundamentalist Seventh Day Adventists, I’ve no doubt I would be his best friend. Maybe sister. I swear I’d know how to fish.
So he normalized me, is what I’m trying to say. And in having lived that much longer, pondered that much more, engaged that much more actively in resisting religious and political wonder-kill machines, he has blazed a kind of trail for aliens like me. Like us. Or lifted up the veil that’s hidden the existing paths surrounding us thus far.
So what does the trail he’s blazed by this book look like?
Real, for one. With or without intention, the essays of this book outline a man who feels rage and fear and pride and grief and indignation, but likewise joy and mirth and hope and gratitude and humility. He toots his own horn, but in the next breath, or essay, disappears into a kind of egoless sage, connecting with the best in all of us. I’m drawn to his aliveness to all of these parts of being human, and to the way his activist hat, and tragic/comic masks, and aged teacher of youth voice, and philosopher’s pipe, and wild prophet hairdo, and scientist’s coat, and druid’s staff, and mystic’s eyes, and any other garb or sound for any of the roles he owns aren’t glued on permanently tight. He dances, at least in this collection, within a full range of humanness. He feels real, in the very best sense of the word. And he’s funny, too.
Surely this is a trail we aliens would do well to follow.
But his trail is more than real. It winds an almost impossible path of attentiveness to detail—to place, to land, to people, and even the smallest grain of sand—but stretches that attention out beyond the scope of any single person’s sight. Politics—again local, but also national and international—get his trail’s time. Religion, of course. And cosmic things, too. One feels the pan in reading this of an intoxicated-with-life cinematographer, whose alternate delight and alarm at the interconnectedness of everything—galaxies all the way down to fundamentalists and writers and dying dogs and salmon—has his camera swinging ever out and in. But the swing is elegant, and unhurried, so by the time you reach the climax, all you can do is…all I can do is…weep. The very best, most fulfilled kind of tears.
If every book with God and fundamentalist and sermon in the title were like this one, I suspect aliens would feel alien no more. Our world would be inhabited and inhabitable by far less war, on every level, and far more kindness, far less senseless death and dying and far more life that stretches through and beyond both things. Wonder would be more like the air we all breathe.
[edited to turn off comments; getting lots of spam on this post for some reason]
I’m sitting in my living room, the sparseness somewhat jarring. An hour ago a truck rumbled off with our piano. Our closets are overflowing with other kinds of friends, books boxed suffocatingly “out of sight”, but the time finally came when we had to choose between them (and all the others scattered on every surface in the house), and this mammoth Lovely, who has languished in our living room virtually silent for over a year. I can’t play while Elijah is present (true, duets are possible, but E’s taste in sound is startlingly, jarringly different than my own), and I’m never here without him either in the room, or sleeping ten feet away.
So…not 48 hours ago I posted a picture on Craigslist, and within minutes had good as sold the thing. The buyer came hours later, paid for it, and arranged for movers to come the next day.
I’m shell-shocked, to be honest. I walked to the park when the buyer left, tearing up the whole way. What have I done? What have I done?
Al, the granddad there each day, was kind, and listened to my woe. We talked about instruments and music. He has a guittar he likes to play. I told him on my list of things to do before I die is learn to play the cello. But, mind you, I said, that diminishes nothing of my love for pianos.
I love pianos. To me they are like ancient trees; they soothe me, ground me. I started lessons at age 4, I think, and played my heart out daily until high school sports and a boyfriend took all my attention away. But I mean that part about my heart. Somehow, through all those years of practice, my heart got wound into all those strings. Maybe pressed into the pedals, the benches, the keys. And not just of only one piano. It’s all of them. The one that just got lugged down our steps walked with me through some very dark times. She gave and gave and gave when I had no words for what I was feeling–only notes.
I still have dreams of more composition, dreams of playing the blues, dreams of finishing the instrumentation for this song.
But…I have a toddler now, and I live in a paper-thin apartment, and even if there were no toddler involved, I would feel strange barging with music into all my neighbors’ homes uninvited.
So I’m sitting in my empty living room, imagining a wall full of books, trying to be happy that I get to see them all again.
As the truck drove off, and Elijah busied himself in the dust from where she stood, as I gazed nostalgically out the window and the smoke from the movers’ cigarettes wafted toward the sky, I thought, “Go well, dear friend. Go well.”
Midtone Blue is back, and if you haven’t ever read him, you must go take a look! His writing is unintended poetry. His wisdom is deep. His archives are full of warmth and wonder and all that makes life good. I’m so glad you’re back, Blue.
You know how when kids are left with babysitters, or at daycare, and maybe they aren’t so used to being away from their folks, so it takes a lot and lot of energy for them to keep it together ’til their parents come back?–maybe energy to cry on and off through that time, in between seeming like they’re doing alright? They end the day playing tearlessly, if not a little more quietly than usual, so when their parents come back, the parents are delighted that the children have done so well. They rush to give them a hug, expecting them to be filled up completely with gladness, but the second the child sees them, they totally lose it. They cry and cry and just collapse in the parent’s arms that way, maybe shaking a little bit, hoping they’ll be held like that forever?
That’s how certain music makes me feel. People, too, but music far more often. Like that child, I mean. Like I’m finally safe and exhausted from all the work of keeping myself together and also sad at what I thought I’d totally lost and a little bit hurt that I had to think I lost it at all, but just glad to be here, too, no matter what’s been done, no matter who did it, melting into this hug.
N’s birthday is today (happy birthday, love!), and among the gifts he opened this weekend was a Wailin Jennys CD called Fourty Days. We’ve listened to most of it, and I swear, these voices have this effect on me. It’s folk music, a Canadian trio, and the clarity of their voices, their pitch-perfect harmonies–it’s like angels and mamas and sisters and fairies and moonlight and the very sweetest kind of nectar all rolled into one.
One song in particular (of those I’ve heard so far…) actually puts words to this feeling I’m poorly describing–words to the kinds of things I like to think and write about here, too, and the kinds of things involved in growing trust, like I wrote about last time. Growing trust and healing, I think, are synonymous. The song is called Beautiful Dawn:
Take me to the breaking of a beautiful dawn
Take me to the place where we come from
Take me to the end so I can see the start
There’s only one way to mend a broken heart
Take me to the place where I don’t feel so small
Take me where I don’t need to stand so tall
Take me to the edge so I can fall apart
There’s only one way to mend a broken heart
Take me where love isn’t up for sale
Take me where our hearts are not so frail
Take me where the fire still owns its spark
There’s only one way to mend a broken heart
Teach me how to see when I close my eyes
Teach me to forgive and to apologize
Show me how to love in the darkest dark
There’s only one way to mend a broken heart
Take me where the angels are close at hand
Take me where the ocean meets the sky and the land
Show me to the wisdom of the evening star
There’s only one way to mend a broken heart
Take me to the place where I feel no shame
Take me where the courage doesn’t need a name
Learning how to cry is the hardest part
There’s only one way to mend a broken heart
You can listen to clips of their latest CD by clicking on the icon of it on left side of their website, and of course iTunes has a clip of Beautiful Dawn and the rest of 40 Days in their collection as well. Go listen. Go buy.
I’m still making my way slowly through Sam Harris’s End of Faith. I just finished a pair of chapters that details the brutish histories of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The second of the pair is on Islam, and by the end of it I found myself more afraid of Muslims than I care to admit–more afraid of their God, their customs, their worldview. And seeing “them” as something unified, too–something all, or at least mostly, alike.
I think Harris is scared, too. His whole book is about how religion, and Islam to the greatest degree, will either have to die, or be the death of us all, given the kinds of mass destruction that modern warfare-combined-with-religion is capable of. But here’s the most robust irony: he is actually giving himself more, and increasingly legitimate, reason to be afraid. By means of his book, he is creating more division, more distrust, more fear of the “other”, and therefore more layers of violence, than would otherwise exist had the book not been written.
This evening I attended a lecture given by Reza Aslan, a scholar of world religions, and expert on Islam. He’s written a book called “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,” and lectured tonight on what he’s calling the Islamic Reformation. According to him, Islam is in an extreme state of flux right now, with authority shifting increasingly away from its clerics/scholars and into the hands of everyone (think Martin Luther, sola fide, sola scriptura). Groups are popping up across the globe of people reading Koranic texts differently, newly, outside of mosques, in the equivalent of home churches. And like in any decentralized institution, groups are forming along the whole spectrum of liberal to conservative, feminist to misogynist, violent to peaceful.
Aslan’s excitement to be alive in this season of change is palpable, and too his eagerness to present a more accurate picture of today’s Islam than any unified story can tell.
I know little of Islam (and plan to read Aslan’s book). But I know lots about Christianity, and can’t imagine, now that Aslan has popped the fear-bubble Harris created for me, that Islam is any more immune to the forces of peace and of violence than Christianity has been. While I plan on finishing Harris’s book (and to explore here some of the good points I think he makes), I’m eager to get a broader picture of Islam in my brain, in my bones, so that I can more fully participate in this project I’m giving my life to, this work of undoing fear.
Jen Lemen, writing partner and co-conspirer of an ever more lovely world, has just launched a beautiful new site. She writes, she makes art, she doulas, she tells a knock-out in-person story. And I’m guessing she’ll give glimpses of all of that on her blog. Yay, Jen!!! Go see what she’s done!
Got tagged by Bob. This is a hard one, as I feel like I’m snubbing about a zillion books by putting any single title down. Hello, books? All the ones I’ve read and that could just as easily be listed here? I’m sorry. Maybe I’ll remember you for next time.
Lately I’ve been so inspired by artists–people putting sounds and words and images and action to the things we feel and know and want to know. Sometimes things we don’t want to know. Bobby posted a link to a really amazing performance of Pink’s "Dear Mr. President," and I cried much of the way through. Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten makes me cry, too–tears that are all about hope and joy and a deep, deep yearning. Watch a video here. Or just read the lyrics.
And there’s this artist, in Columbia, making guitar’s out of guns, instruments of destruction into instruments of peace and construction. "Violence fears love because it is stronger," he says in the interview. "Violence fears my voice because it goes beyond death." Gah! So beautiful.
I could list hundreds and hundreds more. And these are musicians, but what about painters, sculptors, writers, poets–the host of souls doing the frivolous work of prophecy? The "not-a-real-job" of waking us up, lifting us up, agitating us toward action?
Who can say art is an extra in this life, an added film of icing on all the real stuff? I say art is essential. Like the heart that keeps our blood alive.