oh divine who
who
i taste on her neck, feel
in her feeling, see
in her seeing, hear
in her hearing, please,
please:
don’t answer this prayer:
shelter me from the cloud, let it
pass me by: if
unknowing means forgetting her,
no,
Her,
here,
then i’d
rather know than forget.
so help me suffer to name what’s nameless, touch
what’s intangible, discern
the indiscernible and
hold the air.
it’s my first night on the streets in some ten years,
she said.
her body was quivering in the cold, asking
for what her mind refused to exhale.
i sat still,
protesting her silent plea for my jacket, wandering
around in the space between
her missing teeth and
the scabs on her face and
the sores on her hands and
the gaps in her scattered parlance.
when i saw my uncle’s long hair in her
eyelashes, wondering
what it looked like when the medics found him in that detroit hotel room,
her pain shot through me.
meth,
she said,
i just can’t stop.
i’m sorry,
she said,
i don’t mean to trouble you with this sinner’s woe, but
it’s sure nice of you to listen.
i cursed the lilies of the field and
the lips that likened them to raiment and
said
to her,
as if to him,
that my words would no longer toil nor spin to pretend that
he’s made good on his promises.
i’m sorry,
i said, and
i don’t mean to theologize, but
this is god’s sin, not
yours.
that may be,
she said, but
why don’t you see now what
you see now?
why don’t you hear now,
she asked, still quivering,
what you hear now?
i see a place inside of you,
she said,
that i’ve forgotten how to get to.
for a moment, i broke our stare
and watched
the bartender fill empty glasses
and watched
the elderly man across from me,
sitting alone,
whisper out the lyrics to the love song playing on the jukebox.
tell me about this place,
i said,
the place you’ve forgotten how to get to.
it doesn’t have a name,
she said,
and there’s really no way to get there.
somehow,
she said,
it’s nowhere and everywhere at once.
and sometimes,
she said, smiling,
twirling the ice cubes around and around in her glass,
it just pours into you.
so how is it,
i asked,
that you’ve forgotten how to get
to a place you can’t get to?
but that’s just it,
she said in a slur, spilling
her manhattan.
i suppose that i’ve forgotten how to forget.
Something interesting has been happening to God in America. Consider the God of the early colonial period. John Calvin’s God was distant and damning; people predestined to hell by “His” sovereign decree. Jonathan Edwards’s God was judgmental and vengeful; people were sinners in “His” angry hands. Today, God is remarkably (but not altogether) different. “For Americans today,” USA Weekend reported in 2010, “God, quite simply, is love.”[1] Indeed, studies indicate that nearly nine in ten Americans say that “love” is an accurate descriptor for God.[2] For many Americans, moreover, God is not just an arbitrary love-energy in the sky: God is also personally and interactionally loving. According to Tanya Luhrmann in her recent book When God Talks Back, love is a primary indicator of and method by which evangelicals come to experience God as personally and interactionally real in mind and body.[3]
What in the good heavens, if I may be crass, has happened to God? How did a God of fear transform into a God of love (I am taking about degrees of emphasis here, of course–God has “always” been understood to be “loving” in some fashion)? This question of divine love is one that I have been obsessing about lately–and, in a way, since the haunts of my fundamentalist childhood. From founding sociologist Emile Durkheim, who argued that god is society and that society is god (god is a collective representation of what is socially constituted as sacred vis-a-vis the profane, that is), one could surmise that social changes will change god. One such salient social change that has made God “more loving,” I believe, is captured in Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) which demonstrates how, beginning in the 17th century, romantic love became the quintessential human desire through the imaginative prowess of the novel. Before then, people didn’t “marry for love” as we moderns do.
More on that later. For now, I am left with a rather curious question: is there a relationship between how one imagines/experiences God and how one imagines/experiences a lover? Are these imaginings and experiences-these relationships–constituent of one another?
Furthermore, aside from the rise of the novel, are there other historic sources which have served to bridge divine love with romantic love? How about the Song of Songs, almost universally interpreted by Christians as God’s love for the Church and the soul’s love for God? Below is a brief and informal review of a The Song of Songs: A New Translation (1995) by Ariel and Chana Bloch. The book surprised me a bit; put a new spin on this ancient Israeli love poem that I have always loved (in fourth grade, it was the only book of my then-Bible in which every word was highlighted) . Thought I’d include it for curious eyes. It’s interesting: while this ancient love poem may have bridged divine and romantic love, as it turns out, according to the Bloch’s, the Song isn’t explicitly about divine love at all.
Bloch, Ariel and Chana. The Song of Songs: A New Translation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
In this enlivening treatise and translation on the only surviving secular ancient Israeli love poem, Ariel and Chana Bloch argue that the Song of Songs is a sequence of episodic lyric poems about the discovery of erotic love. The poem, the Bloch’s suggest, was likely written by a poet (or a school of poets) in the Hellenistic period sometime around the third century B.C.E. While the Song has long been interpreted by theologians as historical or religious allegory (as (a) God’s love for Israel, (b) God’s love for His Bride, the Christian Church, or (c) the soul’s longing for God) in a way that may have had the effect of “safeguarding” the text from scrupled minds and tamed bodies, the Bloch’s posit that the Song is only correctly interpreted as an embodied, emphatic, and unapologetic celebration of sexual love between an unmarried couple. Indeed: as the Bloch’s point out, there is neither an explicitly divine (God is never mentioned) nor nationalistic impulse in the poem. If a theological theme can be surmised at all, however, the Bloch’s suggest, it is that the Song invites readers to locate (and, indeed, experience themselves) the Kingdom of God in the “habitable present” (not in the mythic past, not in a prophetic future) of human love. A striking feature of the Song, according to the Bloch’s, is its feminist impulse: in the poem, for instance, (1) the female lover (the Shulamite) is equal if not superior to the man (she is love’s “daunting,” bold, and relentless initiator (4.16, 6.4); she is also love’s teacher (2.7, 8.6), and (2) women are given unparalleled prominence and power (there is no mention of “fathers” but repeated mention of “mothers” (1.6, 3.4, 8.5); mothers are the ones who pass the power of love’s lineage along, and “daughters” are looked to as a chorus of social legitimation. To be sure, the Song was not intended to be a logical discourse, and so it may be unfair to bring certain questions to bear on it. I cannot help but be curious, however: how might one understand what love is in accordance to the Song, and what might the implications of that understanding be, say, for the evangelical church (a church that is widely recognized for its prohibition against sex before marriage in addition to its usage of the Song–as the video below illustrates)?
[1] Cathy Lynn Grossman, “How Americans Imagine God,” USA Weekend, December 17-19, 2010, 6-7.
[2] Paul Froese and Christopher Bader, America’s Four Gods: What We Say about God—and What That Says about Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 15.
[3] Tanya Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (New York: Vintage, 2012), 132.
it’s not the same ocean,
she said,
breathing smoke out her lungs.
don’t be silly,
i said,
breathing her smoke into my lungs.
look there,
i said,
don’t you see it holding that little girl’s
body and
coloring her
hair and
making her laugh?
i just see my mother’s tears,
she said,
and the hidden violence in my family’s silence.
i see a girl,
she said,
but she’s not being held.
i took the cigarette from her fingers,
brought it to my lips
into my lungs and then
rested my head on her chest.
maybe it’ll be a different ocean tomorrow,
i said.
one of her mother’s tears fell
onto my left cheek, burnt
by the sun.
it already is,
she said.
i see Her breathing,
hovering over,
breathing us together.
i felt Her
pain
fall like
rain
on my hand.
tell me,
She cried,
how you feel.
feel,
She cried,
how i feel.
oh, it heals,
i cried,
to
feel you
feel me
feel you
in the forbidden.
Initially, I didn’t want to care about the whole Duck Dynasty fiasco. Here we go again, I thought: another evangelical-type in the media making outlandish claims about the relationship between the legitimation of homosexuality and, to use Gayle Rubin’s terminology, “sexual peril.”[1] “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there,” Phil Robertson, Duck Dynasty’s “patriarch” is notorious for saying in an interview with GQ Magazine. “Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” he rambled on nonsensically. Privy to Christian Smith’s insight that evangelical “leaders” often don’t speak for the fickle flock (like this one who is a proponent of homosexuality) and that the media is keen to aggrandize contentious evangelical statements for profit, I tried to rationalize my concern away.[2]
In time, however, I started to care. A lot. Indeed, I started to care about how God was being cast as an antagonist in our social imaginations. How God was being depicted as an oppressor again. How God was being painted as the sort who’d call love between consenting adults a sin. How God was being imagined as one who’d send people to hell for being who they are.
Like never before, younger people are bidding religion adieu. People are claiming to be “spiritual but not religious.” Part of this historic shift away from religiosity is due to the way religious people have imagined God; to the way they’ve painted God on the canvases of our minds. Who’d want to believe in an oppressive God who threatens two people of the same gender who love each other with an eternity burning in the flames of hell as a consequence? Who’d liken their relationship to bestiality and suggest that it is a pretext for social calamity? Who’d be so, well, godless? Fewer and fewer.
It’s interesting, I think: evangelicals take pride in spreading “good news” about God to the world. But if their news is so good, why is it causing large numbers to leave the house where God is said to reside and to see God as a “bad guy”?
Allow me to make two make two propositions.
First, there is a political dimension to the way people imagine and subsequently embody God. The way we think about and then talk about God is, in other words, a political act. Christopher Bader, Buster Smith, and Paul Froese’s 2008 article, “Political Tolerance and God’s Wrath in the United States,” supports this proposition. In their article, Bader, Smith, and Froese found a relationship between “God images” and political intolerance. Their research, that is, demonstrated that people who had a wrathful view of God were more likely to oppose homosexuality and express a desire to curtail gay rights.[3] If God is represented as politically intolerant and oppressive in a society increasingly aware of the need for political tolerance and liberation, it is no wonder why some people would disaffiliate from religion.
Proposition number two: there is a poetic dimension to the way people imagine and subsequently embody God. In When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann posits that the most salient definitional feature of evangelicals from the neo-pentecostal variety is that they have a personal relationship with an intimately loving and interactional God.[4] God, for them, is a dynamic force of love that makes them feel loved. That’s not bad news. Margaret Poloma, Matthew Lee, and Stephen Post’s recent book, The Heart of Religion, demonstrates a relationship, to Marx’s chagrin, between the experience of God’s love in prayer and social action: that the more one perceives to experience God’s love in prayer, the more likely one is to engage in benevolent social action. Charismatic Christians, many of whom were in some sense evangelical, were the most likely population in their study to be loved and loving.[5] Rather than being the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions, and the opiate of the masses, religion appears to be an impetus in America that impels people to enter into and transform oppression, heartlessness, and soulless conditions. That’s not necessarily bad news either, depending on the intricacies of that “love energy,” to use Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin concept.
But here is the definitely bad, bad news: when God is imagined as an oppressor, people internalize that oppression and preclude others (and perhaps those most in need) from an intimate experience of divine love. When this happens, Christians fail miserably at their most basic and essential assignment.
Together, what these two propositions suggest is that God matters: that the way God is imagined and embodied is a powerful form of social matter in our world. The way we think about God is an act of politics and poetry.
[1] Christian Smith, christian america? What Evangelicals Really Want (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 7, 187.
[2] Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,”
in In Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (London:
Pandora, 1992), 282
[3] Paul Froese, Christopher Bader, and Buster Smith, “Political Tolerance and God’s Wrath in the United States,” Sociology of Religion 69, no. 1 (March 2008).
[4] T.M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with
God, (New York: Vintage, 2012), 4.
[5] Matthew Lee, Margaret Poloma, and Stephen Post, The Heart of Religion: Spiritual Empowerment, Benevolence, and the Experience of God’s Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 44.
i really couldn’t tell
which was more beautiful:
was it,
i wondered in wander,
the way he spoke his poem,
lustrously,
out through his tears, out through his fears
or was it,
rather,
i wandered in wonder,
the way she looked as she received his poem,
lustrously,
in through her tears, in through her fears?
perhaps it is better not to tell:
to listen to what not-telling tells, and,
as such,
shush,
allow the conundrum—
in the inexplicable space where two streams of being flow into, become one–
hum, come
become more alive in me,
lustrously.
i’m feeling Her, here—
where his fragrance looms, blooms black roses on the wall, calls
me out of me, and, answering the call, I walk inside it, dark, outside me—
feeling me into Her, here—
where a phoenix rises high, overhead, whispers her fire
into the purple sky, paints, with her wings, bleeds
my heart: Her heart: aflame, calls
me into me, and, answering the call, I walk inside it, light, inside me,
into Her: here
note: this is a draft of a poem for the book (tentatively titled Hart’s Crossing) that Samuel Gray and I are working on about a girl, Hart, and her healing journey from abuse and fear to life and love.
There’s blood in her
voice on the
phone in my
ears in her
cry from her
wrists
on the towel, it’s
been ten years she
said, I’m
falling apart she
said, I’m
spilling she
said, I’m
sorry she
said, that you
have to feel this, I
don’t want to injure
you who flew like a ladybug onto my finger.
*
it’s strange, he
sung, but
we were built to spill into each other, I
said, so
spill into me, I
said, I
can hold the blood your body can’t hold, the
memories you can’t take that he took, the
maddening melodies that he riddled deep into your psyche speak, speaks
out of your wrists tonight.
*
listen: I
will whisper you into the light,
feel: I
will hold your mourning into the morning, you
are
not
alone;
you
are
loved;
your
life
is precious;
never a failure, always
a lesson
*
you have to write about this, she
spilled into me
against her car against my chest against my melody against his melodies, because
people need to feel
this feeling, this
healing, your
words surrounding me, your
arms around me, she
said, what
is this feeling, I
asked, but I
knew her words I know her
wound ran
water from my shoulder
into me
into You
built us to spill
into each other, to
hold one another into
You who flew, in the winds of this beautiful catastrophe,
like a ladybug onto my finger
a.social.spirituality. 