The Joyful Mysteries of Reproductive Justice

On Saturday, I worked as an abortion clinic escort for the first time. Escorts offer moral support and a friendly face for the women whose path to the clinic door is lined by protestors whose intimidation tactics are a shameless smorgasbord of shouting about murder, thrusting leaflets into passing hands, and brandishing disgusting and mendacious placards.

On my way to the clinic, I prayed the rosary, a practice at which I am still very new. Saturday's apportioned subject matter for contemplation is the Joyful Mysteries.

The first Joyful Mystery is the Annunciation, when the angel tells Mary of her impending parthenogenetic motherhood. Mary's “yes” (“Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word”) is often embraced by liberal Christianity as a moment of empowerment and consent; but this “yes” troubles me, circumscribed as it is by power and coercion from all sides. I think of women and girls in the US and around the world whose reproductive options are narrowly circumscribed by social forces, women and girls whose bodily autonomy is consistently violated by poverty and patriarchy and legal structures and social institutions. I think of the “nos,” “nos” unspoken or sublimated or overridden. I think about how every “yes” is a compromised yes, a coerced yes, and I think of the very real improvements we could make to the material and discursive circumstances of these yeses, and the space we could make for these hidden nos, if only we tried.

Don't worry, I know a clinic staffed by very nice people who can help

I first read about the work of clinic escorts at least 18 months ago, and I have finally succumbed to the call that has been quiet yet persistent at the back of my mind ever since then. The call said: These protestors – the ones who are violent, the ones who make death threats, and the ones whose presence is a barrier to justice for those most in need of it – these are your co-religionists. Aren't you going to do anything?

The second Joyful Mystery is the Visitation of Mary to her cousin Elizabeth. I think of the intergenerational solidarity of these two improbably pregnant women, one old, one young, in the face of pregnancies so unplanned that it took divine intervention to make them happen. I think of all the ways in which solidarity between oppressed people manifests. I think especially of women who seek ways to live and to live with dignity in a world that is hostile to their bodies; of black women whose bodies are targeted by white supremacy; of trans women whose bodies are rendered disposable by transmisogyny.

A fellow escort was deeply troubled by a flyer she had seen in her local Methodist church. It advertised a fundraising walk for a crisis pregnancy center – those creepy fake clinics that spread misinformation about reproductive options. My escort friend was concerned to see the anti-abortion agenda pushed so brazenly within the walls of a mainline church.

She isn't wrong to be concerned. Mainline churches have failed hard when it comes to reproductive justice. By silence, by noncommittal waffling, by avoiding the issue for fear of controversy, mainline denominations have allowed the voices of injustice to set the terms of the national conversation. Our reticence has helped cause a political climate in which serious presidential candidates earn applause and acclaim for stating their opposition to abortion under all circumstances.

(Increasingly, when I watch this old Simpsons clip, I expect to hear cheers instead of boos in response to the proposition, “No abortions for anyone!”)

Still a very compelling platform imo

The third Joyful Mystery is the Nativity, childbirth in poverty and peril, one precarious life bringing forth another. I think of the 69% of abortion-seekers in the US who are “economically disadvantaged.” I think of how structural racism and ableism lead to the high rates of poverty among people of color and people with disabilities. I think of all the parents and guardians whose economic disadvantages force them to make heartbreaking decisions about exactly which goods they should deprive their children of today. I think of the shockwaves of devastation caused by an unplanned pregnancy when abortion is not easily or affordably available.

Progressives, and perhaps especially progressive people of faith, need to stop being on the defensive on this issue. We need to stop apologizing for abortion and start treating it as a good and necessary aspect of reproductive justice.

I don't concede the “pro-life” appellation, I don't accept the oversimplified “choice” framework, I'm not interested in the third term in the safe-legal-rare buzzphrase. I care about reproductive justice, the intersectional movement founded by women of color and centering their perspectives. Reproductive justice is about race and economics and ability and sexuality, birth control and abortion and parental leave and childcare, comprehensive healthcare and living wages and affordable housing, education and access and culture. Facilitating coparenting among polyamorous partners, overhauling the foster care system, marriage equality for people with disabilities – all are aspects of reproductive justice.

The fourth Joyful Mystery is the Presentation of the newborn Jesus at the Temple, when the old prophets Anna and Simeon express their joy at seeing him. I think of every friend's baby I have cuddled, every tiny human I have smiled at in passing, every infant I have smothered in kisses. I think of the material and psychological wellbeing I wish on my godchildren. I think of the incalculable value of a supportive community, including those who are older and those who are childless, in the care and upbringing of a child. I think of how forced childbirth and lack of reproductive options reduce this community.

Abortion isn't something we should tiptoe around, apologize for, or treat as a necessary evil. In the political climate of the US, caring about reproductive justice means arguing for abortion as a moral good. “Life,” in the phrase “pro-life,” means only “fetuses carried to term, all other factors be damned.” It's a reduction of the richness of life to pure numbers, where the only number that matters is the birthrate. Quite aside from the fact that indefinite population expansion will eventually outstrip the planet's resources and result in death on an enormous scale, this is a cruelly narrow definition of life, one that prioritizes the dogma of fetal preservation over every actual living human's needs.

The fifth Joyful Mystery is the Finding of prepubescent Jesus in the Temple at Jerusalem, after he goes AWOL from his parents. This is the only story of Jesus' childhood that made it into the canonical gospels. I think of it as an instance of the child Jesus asserting his personhood, refusing to be treated as an appendage to or property of his parents. He breaks from the established hierarchy of his society in order to seek his God. I think of all who are oppressed by the established order of society. I think of their quests for truth and meaning and justice and life. I pray that I might be one to help facilitate that.

Disability, Limits, and the Church

A couple weeks ago, the World Council of Churches called for more inclusivity of people with disabilities in churches. The coordinator of the Ecumenical Disability Advocates Network apparently said this:

“The communion of the churches in unity and diversity is impaired without the gifts and presence of all people, including persons with disability.”

I haven't been able to stop thinking about this statement since I first read it. There's so much to unpack here with respect to my theological interests.

Ever since I started trying to do embodied theology, theology that is in and of and about the flesh, I have been compelled by the image of the Church as Christ's body. This is already a powerfully rich and evocative image in New Testament literature. The image is present in Paul's letters to the Romans, the Ephesians, and the Colossians, but I suppose it gets its most extensive treatment in 1 Corinthians 12.

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body.

I often think about taking this image quite seriously. Given what we know about bodies – from queer theory, from crip theory, from critical race theory – what does it mean that we the Church are, collectively, Christ's body? And what does it mean to call this body, for whatever reason, impaired?

On the social model of disability, “impairment” usually refers to a physical fact about a specific body, while “disability” as such is caused by social and environmental factors. Any disability theory worth its salt from the last five years or more will, of course, note that this distinction is as necessary a step and as unsustainable a dualism as the sex/gender distinction: one can no more conflate these things absolutely than one can separate them entirely. Impairment (/sex) the physical fact and disability (/gender) the social construct are hopelessly entangled, to the point that even what we call “the physical fact” (of impairment or of sex) is itself a social construction.

Deborah Beth Creamer proposes a model of “limits” to displace or supplement the social model's inadequacies. Limits are not identical with either “disability” or “impairment,” and are inherently value-neutral. As a society we naturalize some limits (a person who cannot fly is normal) and pathologize others (a person who cannot walk is defective). As in Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's concept of “misfit,” our understanding of limits tends to be circumscribed by the relations between human bodies and their environment, but attention to the limit or misfit can enable us to interrogate the “default” bodies we construct. Disability becomes “an intrinsic, unsurprising, and valuable element of human limit-ness” (Creamer, Disability and Christian Theology: Embodied Limits and Constructive Possibilities, 96).

So far, so human; but what of God? What about the limits of God? The classical theological notion of kenosis, self-emptying, proposes that God took on limits in the incarnation; but, traditionally, this was in order to overcome said limits through glorification and resurrection. But if the Church is Christ's body – a body of bodies, human bodies, defined by the having of limits – is God, then, not still flesh? Still material? Still limited?

The Church is Christ's body, but it is also a (or many) human institution(s), and as such it is deeply flawed – perhaps even impaired, in the most negative sense – and never more so than when it practices the exclusion of those whose bodies are too disabled, too queer, the wrong color. The Church is the communion of saints, but it is also a temporal coalition of temporal bodies, and as such it has limits – limits that are not necessarily intrinsically good or bad, but limits that are constitutive of it as a body.

I wonder what that means.

Surprised By Love

It seems ridiculous now, but before my godchild was born, I was genuinely worried that I would hate him.

He wasn't my godchild then, of course. He was the imminent spawn of two of my best friends, and while I was legitimately excited for them, I also had a lot of concerns. I'd never been around babies much before, and what I knew about them didn't sound promising. They cried a lot. They pooped a lot. They consumed their parents' time, thoughts, and lives. One time when I was nine I held my neighbor's newborn and accidentally hit her head against the edge of the dining room table, and I was terrified of ever holding a baby again in case I broke it. My friends would be obsessed with their youngling, and I would be unable to participate. Was this tiny human going to ruin two of the best friendships I've ever had?

A week or two before the baby's birth, I was a jerk to my friends. It wasn't premeditated jerkiness – it was just thoughtlessly being a shitty friend – but it's the last thing you need when you're freaking out about your first child's impending entrance to the world. Subconsciously, I think it was a preemptive strike against the baby: you're going to ruin my friendship? Screw you, I'll ruin it on my terms. I'd also had more than enough of being around pregnant people, which is a massive dysphoria trigger for me. Regardless of my reasons, it was a lousy thing to do.

So I was doubly nervous as I made my way to the hospital on December 11^th. Not only was I going to meet a day-old newborn who, as far as I could tell from the Facebook pictures, looked and smelled and sounded exactly as bad as any other day-old newborn, but there was also the lingering tension of my as-yet-unatoned-for shitty behavior.

I was lucky. I got two reconciliations that day. The first was apology and forgiveness over lunch with the baby's father. The second was the moment I took that tiny, sleeping person in my arms.

I hate to be such a cliché, but meeting the person who would be my godchild really did change everything. Leaving the hospital, I felt as though the whole world was a little sparklier, a little more special, a little more awe-inspiring. Before long, I was doing all the things I swore I'd never do: changing diapers, shrugging off spit-up, talking incessantly about the wondrousness of the baby. The most amazing thing to me is just how much I love him.

I've spent much of the past year contemplating this love. It's incredible, and it's frightening. I would throw myself under a bus for my godchild in a heartbeat. I would wrestle spiders for him. I would forgive him if he murdered my whole family in front of my eyes. My love for him is vast, and it is unconditional, and it makes no sense. Why do I love him so? What has he done to merit such love? The answer: nothing, and because he has done nothing to earn my love, there is nothing in all of creation that can separate him from it.

I believe strongly that, in the words of Les Mis, “to love another person is to see the face of God.” I believe that anyone who teaches you a new way to love is revealing to you another glimpse, another facet, of the divine. My godchild has taught me something I didn't know about grace: love that is unearned, unconditional, yet in no way cheap.

I had no idea I was capable of a love like this, and I believe that it is the work of God within me. My love for my godchild has opened me to new loves I had thought beyond me, manifest most recently in romantic love and in the first steps of self-reconciliation. If you'd asked me a year ago, I'd have denied that I had the capacity for godparental love, romantic love, or self-reconciliation, but all of these loves are or will be part of the ever-expanding, dizzyingly vast cosmic Love I have only just begun to explore.

Happy birthday, Jay. I love you with all the love God has graced me to give.

Callings

People at seminary talk a lot about “callings.” I guess it makes sense: why would you become a clergyperson if you didn't feel called to it by God?

One day, after hearing a lot of talk about people being “called” to various things, I said to a friend who, like myself, is looking to a life in academia, not ordination: “I wish I had a calling.”

My friend said thoughtfully, “I kind of feel called to academia.”

“I feel like academia is a black hole,” I said. “No matter how desperately I try to escape it, its gravity just sucks me back in.”

“Um... That is a calling.”

Dammit, I always thought a calling would be something nice. It sounds so friendly! Sunday school lessons about God calling Samuel in the middle of the night always made it sound pretty cool and desirable!

It was supposed to be this^. Instead I got this:

 

I've discussed callings with a number of friends since, both the future clergy and the future professors, and everyone agrees: the smiley-face God-is-my-besty model is a pile of horsefeathers. The black-hole/lightning-sand analogy is far more accurate.

Except for how there is no Westley to rescue you.

 

This rather unhappy understanding of callings does make sense of something that previously eluded me, namely Justin Tanis' idea of gender as a calling. If a calling is something that sucks you in willy-nilly, that drags you along kicking and screaming, that you can fight and struggle against but never escape – well, then my gender is definitely a calling.

I understand that in some denominations aspiring clergy are told not to seek ordination if they can possibly do anything else with their life. I feel that way about academia – if I thought I could do anything else at all, if I even had a plan B, I would certainly do that instead – and at the moment I feel that way about transition.

Maybe it gets easier farther on, when you're passing more often and you've already dealt with crap like legally changing your name. Right now, though, transition and academia both feel like my ineluctable destiny. They both feel like things that have beaten me into submission. Submission is exhausting, but resistance is both exhausting and futile.

Fine. I give in. Academia, transition, you can have me. Not my will, but yours.

Why Do *You* Believe In God?

It's interesting to me that several people – both Christian and non-Christian – have told me recently that they believe in God because of the natural world or because of existence itself. It interests me because that is absolutely not why I myself believe in God.

Let me state off the bat that I mean no value judgment: I don't think one reason for believing in God is somehow more or less valid than another. (Frankly, I think all God-belief is to some extent irrational – that's why it demands the logic-defying leap we call “faith.”) Everything that follows is my own personal belief, feeling, and experience, and I hope it doesn't come across as denying or discrediting anyone else's belief, feeling, or experience of God.

As a matter of fact, I think it is monumentally important to give credit to other people's experience of God most especially when it differs from your own. If you declare your own experience of God to be the only true or valid one, you are confining God to your tiny mind-box and denying the vast, multifaceted, ineffable divine. Giving ear and credence to experiences of God that differ from your own is a matter of humility, of recognizing that God is much much bigger than you are, of acknowledging the divine mystery that God is able to bring billions of unique human individuals into unity without erasing our individuality.

I am rather overwhelmingly preoccupied with the concept of a unity that does not erase individuality – in fact I'm convinced that it is the foundational philosophical conundrum of our time – and that is why I am so interested in ideas about God that do not resonate with me personally. Natural beauty, clearly, is a powerful witness of God to many people; which makes me wonder, why is it not one for me?

For a start, I think, it's because of the emphasis on science throughout my childhood. As far back as I can remember, my brothers and I were encouraged to be interested evolution and natural history and astronomy. Even though I did grow up going to church as well, I never saw God as a necessary factor in the natural world. My schema of the origins and development of the universe was complete in itself; your cosmological argument never made a great deal of sense to me.

Moreover, I am not a big nature person. Like, it's pretty and all, but that's about as far as it goes for me. I'm the world's biggest townie: a picture of the New York skyline makes my heart leap into my throat in a way that, say, one of Everest just doesn't. The closest I get to a religious experience in nature is when I look up at the night sky (somewhere out there an alternate universe version of me is a very happy astrophysicist). I have seen many a breathtaking sunset or waterfall in my lifetime, but those are not the things that stay with me. Maybe my childhood, surrounded by some of the most astonishing natural beauty on the planet, caused me to take it for granted.

The moments that do stay with me – the things I absolutely cannot take for granted – are the ones that give me what I lacked in childhood: namely, friendship. The natural world may not speak to me of God's goodness and love, but I find that goodness and love attested to in overwhelming abundance every time another human invites me to spend time with em, tells me ey cares about me, demonstrates that ey values my presence in eir life.

Creative and artistic works also bear witness to me of God. A book I love so much it hurts; a favorite TV show; “Spirit of Radio” or a Brandenburg Concerto – I can't not believe in God when I experience these things.

And yet, though friendship and creativity both witness to me of God, neither of them is the reason I believe in God. The reason, I'm afraid, is very much a product of my time among the evangelicals, and it comes down to this:

sola Jesu.

I believe in God through and because of (to, for, by, with, from, in, on) Jesus Christ. I can't go into detail, because my relationship with him is very very personal, but to me he is the grounding of everything. Throughout all of my consideration of lofty theological conundrums; in all of the ways that my first year of graduate theological studies has exploded my every attempt at understanding God into a million pieces; whenever I am so lost in deconstruction and postmodernism that I don't know which way is up – it all, in the end, brings me back to him.

If it wasn't for Jesus – for his life as recorded in the Gospels, for the countless theological and creative works interpreting that life, for the transformative encounter I had with him four years ago (whilst reading a passage in Mere Christianity on, of all things, penal substitution!) – I would still be an atheist-leaning agnostic, finding meaning in friendship and in creativity, but not God as such. He is the logic-defying leap for me, the inexplicable that transfigures “meaning” into “God.”

You Self-Identify Wrong

A friend recently sent me this talk by Daniel Dennett, “How To Tell You're An Atheist.” Dennett is, I think it's fair to say, the least obnoxious of your Four Horsemen of New Atheism, and the talk is pretty interesting, especially at the bookends: the phenomenon of closet-atheist clergy is enormously fascinating, as is the observation that religious creeds must tend to impenetrability if they're to survive.

However, the talk's very title telegraphs something that thoroughly infuriates me about New Atheism, and that is its evangelical fervor. I realize I run the risk of making a false equivalency here, so let me state forthrightly that I absolutely do not think that New Atheists and the Christian right are like totally the same and both sides are as bad as each other and the truth lies in the fuzzy-wuzzy middle. The fact that the United States (where much of this discourse is taking place) is a Christian supremacist society means that the dynamics at play when an atheist speaks are very different than when a Christian speaks, even if they're saying the same thing. They're coming from different places, they got there in different ways, they have diametrically opposed agendas; but the fundagelical and the atheist telling me I'm not really a Christian are both very wrong.

The intense hostility of much of US culture toward atheists is pretty mystifying for us godless-commie-Europeans, but it certainly exists, and it completely explains the forcefulness of some American atheists. When you're a marginalized group trying to assert yourself to a dominant culture that would prefer to pretend you don't exist, you have to be loud and proud, and if you bruise the delicate fee-fees of your oppressors, well, cry me a frickin' river. I get that. But the marginalization of non-believers in the US really isn't exactly the same as other axes of marginalization and oppression, because belief (or lack thereof) is, as Dennett points out in that speech, entirely internal. His suggestion that Christians who help the poor are closet atheists is breathtakingly cynical (and that's coming from a thoroughgoing cynic), but his point stands: no matter what someone says and does, we can't know what they truly do or don't believe. Dennett's theory is that, for an awful lot of people, their behavior and their beliefs do not align. Christianity, on his reading, is teeming with closet atheists for whom the social consequences of admitting their lack of faith are just too high.

Now, I sympathize with the goal of making it socially acceptable to be openly atheist. Frankly, I find it nonsensical that it's not acceptable here. But I have a lot less sympathy for the accusation of widespread bad faith or false consciousness – for the practice of telling self-identified Christians that, if they're thinking people or not fully orthodox or lefties, they're probably not really Christians.

Since Dennett himself uses the analogy of gayness (which is totally not in any way a cheap shot or a false equivalency), let's roll with that. I am a queer person, and if I'm perfectly honest straightness baffles me. On a gut level it weirds me out and repels me, and, though I'm surrounded by self-identified straight people, I just don't get why anyone would be straight.

I could make the argument that they shouldn't be. I could say that, once upon a time, I thought I must be straight too, before I knew it was possible to be anything else; that I understand the fear of social consequences that keeps people closeted; that probably there are tons of straight-identified people who are really secret queers, but they're too uninformed or afraid to admit that they're anything other than straight.

To some extent, I think this is true (though the numbers are probably fewer than I'd like them to be), just as it's true of closet-atheist Christians. But that doesn't mean I think it's right to second-guess all straight people, to tell them their identity as a straight person is a lie (at best to everyone around them, at worst to themselves as well), to redefine the parameters of straightness so as to exclude a lot of straight-identified people (because I understand straightness better than they do? because I know them better than they know themselves? because I've put a lot of thought into this whole issue, and the fact that they still call themselves straight proves that they haven't?). My goal might be the noble one of encouraging self-actualization and greater self-understanding, but this tactic sucks. It's aggressive, it's arrogant, it's domineering, and it's hierarchical.

Saying “if you call yourself straight, but you've ever thought about kissing someone of the same gender as you, then you're actually a big flaming 'mo” isn't helpful. For straight people who are not ready to think deeply about sexuality, that statement sounds like a threat. For straight people who have thought deeply about sexuality, it's insulting and delegitimizes their process. Either way, it's accusing straight people of a false consciousness and co-opting their identity.

Of course, if your ultimate concern is swelling the ranks of people you can call queer, then I suppose this is the optimal tactic. But if your ultimate concern is giving people the tools for greater self-awareness, better critical thinking, and a richer engagement with the world and people around them, then you're better off sticking to education. Despite his title and some of his more condescending moments, Dennett does recognize this in that speech, and that is why I have more respect for him than for Dawkins et al.

By all means, be as loud and proud an atheist as you want. God (or whoever) knows the world needs more thinking people who will stand up boldly for what they (don't) believe in. People need to encounter others who think and live differently than they do. It's the only way to learn and grow as a person.

Tell me how you self-identify, what you think and believe, and why; I need to hear it. Just don't fucking tell me what I am.

The Religious "Community"

Anyone who is even casually acquainted with me in meat-life will be aware of two facts: (1) Community returned this week, and (2) I was very, very, very, very happy about this.

Community is straight-up my favorite show on TV. Its midseason disappearance from NBC's schedule was devastating to me, and the announcement of its return had me capslock keymashing all over the internet. I celebrated Thursday's episode with friends and champagne: it was glorious and beautiful, and it's not really an exaggeration to say that this show is a religious experience for me. Here's why.

1. The community of television

I tend to be fairly generous with my definition of “the religious”. Like Tillich, I think religion is an orientation toward ultimate concern; like Barthes, I believe we are surrounded by images that signify ideologies – and if popular culture reveals and reflects a society's most deeply held values, then it's not a huge leap to argue that pop culture can be a locus of religious experience. (Tom Beaudoin's Virtual Faith makes this argument very nicely.)

Although TV ownership in the US is apparently declining, television is still the most ubiquitous form of mass media in this country (of that 3.3% of TV-less households, it's a fairly solid bet that many of them still watch shows online). As such, it is the most unifying artifact of American popular culture, and thus television as a whole could be considered a site of religious meaning. Even for a small cult show like Community, several million viewers participate in the weekly ritual of watching it – a shared experience that nonetheless resonates on a personal level for each individual, much like a religious service.

2. The community of the individual

Some people have accused the Community ensemble of being uniformly terrible human beings who evince no character growth and are unlikeable and completely unrelatable. I will not link to the people saying these things, because they are erroneous, incorrect, inaccurate, misguided, mistaken wrong-mongers who are very very wrong.

I see myself in Jeff: his walls of sarcasm and cynicism that try but fail to hide the true depths of his emotional responses.

I see myself in Britta: her enthusiasm for political causes and her morality that stems from a heart in the right place but is often ill-thought-out or hypocritical in practice.

I see myself in Abed: his profound love of pop culture, his social discomfort, his use of pop culture to understand those around him.

I see myself in Shirley: her deep Christian faith and her struggle to overcome her personal failings to live a really loving Christian life.

I see myself in Annie: her neurotic perfectionism and intense fear of failure.

I see myself in Troy: his goofy sense of humor, his deep bromance with his BFF, his quest for a place and purpose in the world.

I see myself in Pierce: his desperate desire for acceptance and inclusion, insecurities often masked by acting like an almighty asshole.

I really, really love these characters. Each one of them speaks to a different part of my own personality, often in ways that illuminate my flaws and weaknesses. They are complicated, imperfect human beings, but they love each other and I love them. They embody the complex, messy reality of being human – of being simultaneously wonderful and terrible, capable of beautiful things and horrific things, worthy of love and of hate.

3. The community of friends

It's called Community because that's what it's ultimately about. This is a show about a group of people who are thrown together in a situation that's for none of them ideal, and who learn to make the best of it. The interpersonal dynamics at play in this show are special because they are bold and because they speak a truth that is rarely spoken in television.

Compare the show Friends. That was also a show about a group of friends, and it was often a sweet show with a good heart, but all the friends came from the same social location: straight, white, young, of a certain socioeconomic bracket. Community dares to portray a very diverse group of people who find common ground without erasing their differences. The relationship between the Self and the Other must involve both the unity of commonality and the space of respecting difference. Friendship is the experience of navigating this Scylla-and-Charybdis – learning to find common ground in your shared humanity while celebrating and benefiting from each other's difference – and Community portrays this wonderful, difficult process better than any other show I've ever seen.

4. The heart of Community

Community is a dizzyingly inventive show, playing with pop-culture history in endlessly fun and creative ways, but it is still a television show, and as such it follows a certain formula. The characters love each other; they learn lessons about the value of friendship; they make missteps and hurt each other, but they ultimately make the right choices and warm our hearts. Like religious truth, Community's heart is both inexhaustibly profound and completely obvious.

So very many religious and philosophical traditions hinge on the Golden Rule. Jesus himself said that everything else was pretty much window-dressing. Love your neighbor as yourself: it really couldn't be simpler. And yet we have to be taught it, over and over again, in different ways and by different people, and we still don't do it. It's childishly simple, but it's also really difficult.

In the same way, Community is a television show. More specifically than that, it's a half-hour network sitcom. It plays by established rules and conveys a simple, feel-good message. At the same time, though, it takes such delight in exploring the limits of those established rules and finding new and awesome ways to express that simple message.

Community is a show about love, it's a show written from a place of love, and I believe it's a manifestation of God's love in the world. I leave you with the moment I first knew this show was something really special and a nugget of pure wisdom: cabeza es nieve, cerveza es bueno.

Refiner's Fire

This Lenten season, I have given up self-loathing.

I'm doing okay so far. Not great, though I never expected to stop hating myself altogether – you don't lose the habit of a lifetime just by deciding to give it up for Lent – but I've at least managed to steer clear of wallowing.

In the week or so running up to Ash Wednesday, it was very, very bad. Curl-up-under-my-desk-and-sob bad. Sit-in-the-back-seat-and-cry-silently-to-myself bad. When I get mired in it like that, it's very difficult to extricate myself, because it's self-perpetuating: I hate myself, and then I hate myself more for being so self-absorbed as to be thinking about how much I hate myself... It feeds itself.

So on Ash Wednesday I said to myself sternly: This ends now. For the next forty days, there will be no wallowing.

I've kept to that resolution pretty well, I think. Usually it present itself as a very stark choice between paths – THIS WAY TO THE QUAGMIRE OF SELF-LOATHING – and I just have to force myself to pick the sunny one. (No, inner voices, you're the worthless pieces of shit.) Unfortunately, I have not yet found a way to shut off the constant lower-level white noise of self-hatred that accompanies my every waking moment.

It feels as though that low-level stuff has stepped up its game in the past couple of months, but I don't think this is actually the case. I think what's happened is an increase in my self-awareness, to the point that I am now fully cognizant of (a) just how much self-loathing I've been carrying around in my brain-holder and (b) the possibility that maybe I should be trying to change that. (I also blame heightened self-awareness for the amplified gender identity struggle, which is not an entirely separate issue from the self-loathing one.)

This is not easy. Externally, my life is as close to perfect as it's ever been, and maybe it's because I feel I don't deserve such happiness that I torture myself so.

Fiction used to be enough. For at least a dozen years now, I've had one particular ongoing fictional world in which I spend at least a little time every single day. It sufficed as a channel, a coping mechanism, for my self-loathing (and, actually, some of my gender issues too). But lately that's not enough. I can't funnel it all into a world of my imagining anymore. I can't pretend my brain is made of tiny boxes. The walls are coming down, and I don't know what to do.

But, in my moments of optimism and faith, I can believe that what I am facing right now is the refiner's fire, and that I will be purified.

Jesus Beat Me Up

(A short story of the fictional variety. Please note that I do not share my narrator's conception of "virginity".)

I lost the unthinking faith of my childhood when I got old enough to start thinking critically; not in the sudden, momentous way one loses a wallet or one's virginity, but in the gradual, trickling fashion one loses the memories of a long-dead grandparent, which fade each day they're left unthought of until nothing remains but a vague sense of past warmth, so distant and dim it might have happened to a character in a book you once read. That's how it was with me and Jesus.

If there is a God, he/she/they/it must surely curse puberty as its greatest enemy. How many of us, after a decade or so of trusting now-I-lay-mes, abandon the cold comfort of prayer for the more tangible nighttime consolations (and much more immediate gratification) of masturbation? How many of us, in the earth-shattering self-absorption of our changing bodies and developing minds, put away thoughts of the divine along with all our other childish things? How many of us, with the new-found cynicism of the morbid young teenager, declare religion a false hope for children and the feeble-minded, and commit to a far more sophisticated preoccupation with existentialism, Bauhaus, and still more masturbation?

I'm extrapolating, of course. If puberty was for everyone the Christ-killer it was for me, this world would have no priests, no street-corner God-botherers, no thoughtful theologians; and I no longer subscribe to the adolescent arrogance that once convinced me all priests and God-botherers and theologians were stunted creatures arrested in a childhood state of denial. Truth be told, these days I envy the God-botherers their faith. I admire the strength of will it takes to believe in anything other than the abyss. When I hear them speak of experiencing God's love, of “just knowing” something is out there, of having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, I no longer snort in derision; instead, I find myself wishing I knew how to convince myself that any of this was true. I wonder if a large segment of humanity really does have access to a plane of existence that is closed to me. And then I wonder if I had my shot at finding it, and I blew it.

It happened at about 3:07am on Wednesday, July 11^th, 2007, a few hundred feet shy of the rim of Mt Kilimanjaro. I was climbing with a group of friends from university. This was the final day of our ascent, and we had risen shortly after midnight to tackle the steep scree slope that was to take us to Gillman's Point by sunrise, and from there along the crater rim to the highest point in Africa. I never made it as far as the rim.

At 16,000 feet, the air was thin and bitterly cold. Every breath seemed to empty me of more oxygen than it took in, and each step up the treacherous slope was punishing to my lungs and body. “Do Your Ears Hang Low” was looping incessantly and infuriatingly in my head. On top of all that, altitude sickness had been targeting me with a vengeance since Horombo.

For the third time within half an hour, I stumbled to my knees behind a rock to vomit up what little was left in my stomach. Even through the thermal layers, I could feel the sharp icy scree digging into my legs as a fresh paroxysm convulsed me forward onto my gloved hands. For a moment I rested there on my hands and knees, sucking the last little chunks of vomit from between my teeth and spitting them into the shameful little patch of dark brown bile. Gasping in lungfuls of thin, piercing air, I wiped the involuntary tears from my eyes onto my shoulder, and that was when Jesus appeared to me.

He was barefoot in jeans and a Penn State T-shirt, and even in my miserable state I knew that was impossible, but I barely had a second to register that thought before he kicked me in the face.

More in surprise than pain, I reeled backward. Jesus stepped calmly forward and kicked me again, this time in the stomach. Through all my layers, it barely hurt, but I was so weakened by altitude and exhaustion that the force of the kick sent me sprawling.

His face inscrutable, Jesus leaned over and grabbed me by the throat. My gloved hands scrabbled uselessly at his bare one, as with steely grip he hauled me up and slammed me against the big rock. Everything swam as I fought for even the too-thin air surrounding me, and then Jesus' fist smashed into my nose.

My whole head rang with shrapnel from the explosion of pain. The stupid song was still repeating, amped up to a screaming volume in my ears, as Jesus punched me in the face, again and again; weirdly, exactly in time with “Do Your Ears Hang Low”.

When I felt pummeled to the limit of my endurance, sure that one more punch would tear through my skull like tissue paper, Jesus suddenly let go. Dazed, plummeting toward unconsciousness, I slid back to the ground. From my pulverized face, I looked up at the figure – who did not seem to have exerted himself at all – with one thought filling my mind: What the fuck?

Jesus smiled mildly, delivered one final kick to my crotch, and sauntered away down the mountainside.

A moment later, the guide found me, curled up and bleeding, too tired and hurt even to weep. He and my friend Terry between them got me back down to Kibo Hut, and nobody ever mentioned the bruises that discolored my face for weeks afterward. At times I wondered if anyone else could even see them.

You Are A Boring, Selfish Jerk

It's a fundamental tenet of my theology and my anthropology that admitting you are a boring, selfish jerk is the first step on the lifelong road to not being a boring, selfish jerk.

The trouble is, sometimes I find myself unable to take any other steps.

When I haven't written anything in a while, it's usually because I've been getting bogged down in self-recrimination. There's no point. I have nothing to say. God, I am such a boring, selfish jerk.

External validation doesn't really help. In fact, my psyche can get quite creative in trying to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of, say, having many awesome friends whilst knowing myself to be a boring, selfish jerk. At best, I am cheered that I have at last developed some ability to pretend to other humans that I am not (entirely) a boring, selfish jerk.

After all, what is human interaction but a continuous endeavor to pretend to one another that we are not (or, to put it less cynically, to try not to be) boring, selfish jerks?

And how am I supposed to live out the sacred mantra Be True To Yourself when even I can't stand my true self?

I think seminary probably has a higher-than-average concentration of people who loathe themselves. I think an acute awareness of and furious frustration with your own total depravity can be a very powerful motivating factor to orient yourself toward the Ultimate.

Sometimes, though, it swamps you. It's not that life doesn't go on. It's not that you don't still have plenty to enjoy and be grateful for. It's just that you go about it all stooped under the consuming burden of self-knowledge. And what are you supposed to do with that?

What do you do with all that self-loathing?

The Gospel of the Living Dead

I just read a book called Gospel of the Living Dead, in which theologian Kim Paffenroth analyzes five great zombie movies (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead 1978, Day of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead 2004, and Land of the Dead) from a Christian perspective. Though he stops short of making this explicit, Paffenroth traces a through-narrative of the four Romero films that pretty clearly mirrors the trajectory of Jesus' death and resurrection.

A crucial theme of Romero's first four Dead films, and something very few of his disciples have ever picked up on, is the development of the zombies. Night of the Living Dead presents the ghouls as nothing more than the mindless flesh-eaters we all know and fantasize about shooting; Dawn begins to hint that there is something more to them than just the cannibalistic instinct; Day portrays a zombie beginning to develop rudimentary skills and basic emotional ties; and by Land of the Dead the zombies have their own more or less functional city alongside the humans. Paffenroth reads the movies as increasingly optimistic, traveling from the utter bleakness of Night's wonderfully nihilistic ending to a degree of hopefulness for human/zombie coexistence by the end of Land.

This also is pretty much how I read the crucifixion and resurrection.

Consider: the death and descent of the zombie uprising, with all the hellishness that entails, is the very thing that undoes materialistic, capitalistic, kyriarchal society – Romero is famous for his fierce social critique, and Paffenroth does a fine job of unpacking the films' criticisms of racism, sexism, class inequality, rampant consumerism, and so on – and ultimately allows for the rebuilding of a better world. Now this could be read in the traditionally eschatological way (there's a reason we call it zombie apocalypse), but I prefer a non-eschatological theology that sees this death-and-resurrection narrative as the narrative of the daily taking up of the cross.

Redemption only comes through the utmost suffering. The zombies, like all of society, must lose their souls in order to regain them. They die to self in order to be reborn as a new community. Only by losing our lives can we gain life; only by dying could Jesus defeat death.

Compare Mark C. Taylor's Erring, a “postmodern a/theology” which declares the post-Hegel world to be a world without God, self, history, or book. These four concepts are dead, and something new must be built in their place – something radically new: an erring, mazing, de/constructive, relational freeplay that does not resort to oversimplifications or hierarchized oppositions. Something, in fact, rather like human/zombie coexistence.

I've never understood why Nietzsche's “God is dead” pronouncement shocked anyone. I mean, what do Christians believe happened on the cross? Isn't the crucifixion really the moment that kills God, self, history, and book; that kills the transcendental signified, the ultimate referent, the Logos? And isn't it only by this death that it can rise again, new and different and wonderfully strange?

My First Christmas

I hadn't really been thinking about it until the end of term, when suddenly everyone was going home for the holidays and I wasn't. That was when I realized I was thinking of my Lonely Christmas almost as a rite of passage: as something necessary, something I had to do.

Partly it's because my older brother spent Christmas away from the family two years ago – the first time we weren't all together – and so it seemed natural to follow in his steps.

Partly it's because I have some friends who are quite open about how much they hate Christmas – how tense and miserable it is to bring unhappy families together under the immense pressure of knowing it's supposed to be The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year – and I've always wondered how it feels to be unhappy on Christmas.

And I think there's a theological reason too. I think that, as everything I learn about God convinces me more that God stands with the poor, the outcast, the lonely, the oppressed, it just doesn't seem right to mark God's coming into the world by being all warm and happy with my family.

Christmas isn't supposed to be warm and fuzzy.

The first 22 Christmases of my life couldn't have been warmer or fuzzier. I gathered with my parents and brothers, ate and drank gluttonously, tore open an abundance of presents (none of which, casting my mind back, I can even remember), and sang about the little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay.

On my 23^rd Christmas, I actually thought seriously about the little Lord Jesus.

Like most people with a Classics degree, I am unconvinced by the nativity narratives of Matthew and Luke. They're riddled with historical implausibilities, and are probably somewhat tortured back-formations designed to make Jesus fulfill the messianic prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures as translated into the Septuagint. The Christmas story is not convincing as historical truth (which is not to say it must be historically false, just that it probably is); but as aesthetic truth, as theological truth, it shines a great light in the darkness.

Read as a narrative affirming God's presence, God's total identification, with the poor and the outcast, the Christmas story is a purveyor of profound theological truth.

God in the form of a newborn baby: God is with the helpless.

God born in a stable, laid in a manger: God is with the homeless.

God born in an occupied territory of a mighty empire: God is with the oppressed.

God on the run from a murderous tyrant: God is with the refugee.

Compared to the suffering of most people in this world, my Lonely Christmas was hardly lonely. I have a family that loves and misses me, though it is 5000 miles away. I have friends who welcomed me into their home. I have more friends who let me know they were thinking of me.

But I am still a stranger in a strange land, and in that small way I feel an abiding kinship with the God who took on human form, with its weaknesses and sorrows and limitations, in order to bring the constant and unfailing word of hope to me and to all humankind: you are not alone.

Hell: Still Not A Thing

Back in March, I weighed in on the Rob Bell hubbub that was then storming the Christian blogosphere. Half a year late to the party, commenter “everdox” has this to say:

Sadly Rob Bell has made an attempt to contend with the will of God, and recreate in his own mind, the will of man and not God. We do not understand God, therefore all questions of sorts such as: would an all loving God create an eternal hell? Are off limits.

[snip – proof-texts]

Furthermore, read the book of Jude. I pray that God will lead you to a clear understanding of what is happening. Universalism can disguise itself as love all it wants, but is quite possibly the most cunning system satan himself has ever cooked up. Universalism opens the door to living life outside of the ten commandments amongst everything else Jesus talked about, because of the simple fact that we will all be saved.

This is clearly not the case.

[half a dozen more proof-texts]

My go-to blogger on this topic, Mr John Shore, rebuts these arguments more eloquently than I ever could:

“God Can Love Me; God Can Send Me To Hell. But He Can't Do Both.”

What Francis Chan (And His Ilk) Get So Terribly Wrong About Hell

(please read this one, everdox) Is God's Justice Different Than Ours? Hell, No.

So I'm not going to argue from logic and rhetoric and theology why I think everdox is wrong (though I will say, their first paragraph is awfully sad. Questions are off limits? What a tragically, crushingly restrictive response to human inquiry and intellectual activity. Spinoza's doing somersaults in his grave). I'm just going to explain why I, personally, psychologically, cannot possibly believe in hell (hell in the fire-and-brimstone-eternal-torment sense, that is, not the hell of self-awareness). It boils down to this:

Either I'm going to hell, or nobody is.

I've been living inside this head for twenty-wev years. I know exactly how terrible of a person I am. I know that I am totally self-obsessed, that I'm a hypocrite whose actions aren't in line with my beliefs, that I kind of have a soft spot for “Party in the USA”. If the universe is a merit-based operation, then I'ma burn, baby, burn.

“Exactly,” says the Christian right. “You deserve to burn, but because of God's grace you won't.” (Well, they say that until they learn that I'm an unrepentant gay-sex-haver, but since I am now happily and maybe permanently single we can get past that.)

“That's fine,” I say. “We're on the same page re: grace. I suck, but God's merciful. Fantastic. Here's my problem: why me? If God picks and chooses who gets saved, why the hell would God pick a douchebag like me? Why does God's grace apply to me but not to my best non-Christian friend, who is a demonstrably superior human to me in every measurable way?”

“Um,” says the Christian right. “Mysterious ways... beyond our comprehension... faith not works... can we talk some more about how gay sex is totally icky?”

You see, I can accept the part where all people miss the mark. (That's what sin, hamartia, actually is – missing the mark, falling short, failing to measure up.) I can accept the part where God, in mercy and grace, forgives us even though we don't deserve it. I cannot accept the part where God arbitrarily dispenses that mercy and grace according to whim, saving some of the mark-missers and condemning others just for the lulz. God is vast, ineffable, beyond human comprehension; but that doesn't mean that God is a capricious tyrant whose justice is diametrically opposed to human logic and ethics.

I mean, have you ever heard anyone argue for the existence of hell who thought they were going there? People who want hell to exist want it for other people. That right there should be ringing all your alarm bells. The traditional doctrine of hell is self-righteousness crystallized.

It must be nice to have the self-confidence to say things like, “Hell exists but I'm not going there.” Unfortunately I carry with me a constant awareness of my own crapness, so for me it's more like, “If hell exists I am definitely going there.” Since the salvific action of Jesus Christ assures me that I am not going there, hell ipso facto does not exist. Quod erat demonstrandum, verbum sapienti sat est, nunc est bibendum.

Nerd Theology II: Response to a Response

Victoria of Gaudete Theology wrote a critique of my post Nerd Theology. I'm thrilled to respond, both because the back-and-forth makes me feel like a ~*real academic*~ and because dialogue is essential to any meaningful exercise in process theology (which “Nerd Theology” most certainly is).

“In this tent we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling.”
2 Corinthians 5:2

“[In Heaven] there will be no animal body to weigh down the soul in its process of corruption; there will be a spiritual body with no cravings, a body subdued in every part to the will.”
Augustine, City of God XIX.17

There are two major frustrations I have with human physical reality as we currently know it:

1. That the human body is so limited. I can't number the times I've wished for a second pair of arms. Or stalk eyes. Or the ability to fly. Or – the most frustrating aspect of being human – the ability to function without needing to waste a third of my life sleeping. (As brilliant and important a field as it is, I don't want to get into disability theory just now; all I'll say is: read The Chrysalids, and don't accept the popular conception of the non-disabled body as normative, whole, and ideal.)

2. That the human body limits understanding. One of the earliest lessons you absorb with your baby formula is “don't get strung up by the way I look, don't judge a book by its cover” (N.B. If as a small child you absorbed the lesson in exactly this formulation, you are probably a much more awesome person than I am). But grounding my essential personhood in the particular physical body with which I am currently lumbered is doing exactly that. When you look at me and judge me to be a woman, you're reducing my personhood to a socioculturally constructed identity. Everyone, of course, makes these judgments all the time, every day, because we have no way of connecting mind-to-mind, personhood-to-personhood, and really understanding one another.

This is where God comes into it. Victoria points out that the incarnation collapsed the one true dualism of Creator and created; for Christians, this collapsing is perennial because of the Holy Spirit, the aspect of the Creator God that is now a part of us. This universal Spirit makes us one body – it connects us, mind-to-mind, personhood-to-personhood – but in our current physical reality we have no way of truly concretely experiencing this connection. The point of a transhumanist, biotechnological theology is to seek real and tangible ways of exploring our unity in the Spirit.

She's right, of course, to point out that I risk succumbing to Cartesian dualism. (Oh, irony – in seeking to avoid one form of dualism, I get sucked into another.) I suppose her point is that, whatever issues I personally may have with it, our experience as humans unquestionably encompasses the physical realm. I suppose my point is that I believe our experience of the physical realm could and will be radically different without the loss of our humanity.

And I do think the resurrection supports this belief. Jesus' post-resurrection body retains what is awesome about having a physical body (and I do recognize that some things about it are awesome; just because I'm so often uncomfortable in my own skin doesn't mean I don't enjoy good food and hot baths and hugs from those I love), while adding a number of upgrades and bugfixes. Teleportation? Yes please! Ability to pass through matter? Bring it on! The resurrected Christ is arguably the first post-human.

The Hell Of Self-Awareness

Leftist religionists like yours truly tend to place near-exclusive emphasis on God's Love, leaving the image of a judgey God to our fundamentalist cousins.

Well, this is why I believe in God's judgment.

In brief: cute little gay kid loves Lady Gaga, has posse of girl buddies, makes It Gets Better video, continues to be horribly bullied, takes own life. On the day of his wake, big sister attends school dance with her friends and his; when a Lady Gaga song is played, they start to cheer and chant his name – whereupon the bullies shout in response that they're glad he's dead.

People do evil stuff. People do evil stuff, and, so far from regretting it, they do more evil stuff. That can't be the end of the story.

If hell exists, it's self-awareness. It's having the conscience, maturity, and self-reflectiveness to comprehend just what a piece of shit you are. It's losing sleep to the roiling in your gut as you remember the time fifteen years ago when somebody made fun of the fat kid and you laughed. It's the agonizing remembrance of every cruel or thoughtless thing you ever said, knowing bone-deep how much it hurt the other person.

“If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.”

It might happen when they grow up a little, or it might not happen in this lifetime; but one day the children who hounded and persecuted little Jamey Rodemeyer to death and beyond it will know what it feels like to truly love and truly be loved. When they do, the full magnitude of the evil they have done will hit them like burning coals on their heads. They will know themselves, and they will be in hell.

God's justice is God's love. God's love is the very judgment that sends evildoers to the hell of self-awareness.

This hell is a necessary step on the road to redemption. No matter what you've done, there is no true redemption without experiencing the hell of self-awareness. For their own sakes, I want Jamey Rodemeyer's tormentors to know hell.