Thirty Days of Poems: Dolorosa (Day 4)

            I went to a wedding today

            the second I’ve attended since

            you got married.

            You would have loved the venue:

            a small stone chapel

            almost like a cottage

            in the woods

            with a high Gothic ceiling

            and a stained-glass portrait

            of the via dolorosa

            hanging just over the altar.

 

            And the ceremony

            may have been more high church

            than what we were used to

            growing up in Texas

            but the bride processed in

            to some Elvish-sounding music

            and after the exchange of vows

            we all had communion

            and the newlyweds came in together

            bearing the grail and bread.

 

            The whole first year after

            when I heard about a friend’s engagement

            my immediate reaction

            was to try and stop it.

            It was silly of me, I know:

            not every walk down the aisle

            has a cross at its end.

            And over time

            I got better, or

            learned how to fake it.

           

            But today

            when the priest said,

            “Speak now, or forever hold your peace”

            it was hard not to think of that moment

            in your wedding

            and the silence where

            no one spoke.

 

           And when the bride and groom

           pledged their fidelity to one another

           in sickness and in health

           to have and to hold

           from this day forward

           I thought of you and him

           the vows he made to you that day

          flanked by the groomsmen

          with whom he had already

          betrayed them.

 

          One day

          a few years from now

          I’ll have my own ceremony.

          And with laughter and communion

          my friends will escort me

          into a new realm of life.

          But even amid the celebration

         there will be a quiet ache

         dull but persistent

         because of the empty space

         where you should have been

         and the marriage you never had.

Tonight, All the Children Are Crying: A Lament for Nigeria

Three hundred girls.

 

The hope of their nation. The brightest young women Nigeria had to offer. They were going to be teachers, doctors, lawyers, politicians. They had dreams of leading their country out of the darkness.

 

But that’s not how it’s turned out. They were carried away. Awoken in the middle of the night to the noise of gunfire, forced out of their beds by sweaty, dangerous-looking militiamen, with AK-47s primed at their backs they disappeared into the night and haven’t been seen since. The darkness swallowed them up.

 

It swallowed up the hope of Nigeria.

 

The hope that a woman could get a real education and grow up to be something other than the twelve-dollar bride of a tribal warlord.

 

The hope that a country racked by violence and religious militancy could look towards the future and begin to heal itself.

 

Those dreams were taken away, into the jungle where three hundred brilliant, talented women were tallied up and sold like the cheapest of human commodities.

 

This need not have happened. It shouldn’t have happened.

 

And as I join with people of faith throughout the world tonight in praying for their return, I wonder why I live in a world where these things do happen, why they seem to happen so often. Why men with Bibles and Korans and machine guns are trying to destroy everything good and beautiful in this world. Why they throw acid in the faces of little girls who have the courage to attend school and determine the course of their own lives. Why they shoot strong women, brave women, in the back of the head, for the crime of being strong and brave.

 

I keep thinking of the lines to an old song we used to hear on Christian radio growing up. Tonight the lyrics resurfaced, more poignant and powerful than ever:

 

            Little child

            Dry your crying eyes

            How can I explain the fear you feel inside?

            For you were born

            Into this evil world

            Where man is killing man

            And no one knows just why

 

            What have we become?

            Just look what we have done

            All that we’ve destroyed

            You must build again

 

Yes, some humans have made this world a truly terrible and hellish place to live in. We have to do better. We have to create a better world for our children, a world not characterized by the deafening roar of bombs and ceaseless cacophony of bullets but by the quiet hum of students thinking, reading, writing poetry, creating model UNs—free to dream and discuss and flirt and fight and fall in love in peace and safety.

 

A world where the “threat” of peace doesn’t scare us.

 

A world without drones or guns, where the state no longer wields the grisly instruments of torture and death.

 

A world where women are not seduced and exploited by twisted religious perverts—in America or anywhere else.

 

Where they can study astronomy and biology and literature and math and politics without fear of reprisals from men bearing scriptures and machetes.

 

Where they can be anything they want to be, live any dream they want to dream, and no one can ever again take those dreams away from them.

 

So many have been hurt; so many have died. Tonight I pray against hope for the return of these young women, even as I mourn the possible loss of all they might have become. But I realize that in a much larger sense this is just another tragedy in a world full of them. It seems like every time the world has a chance to go right, someone comes along to wreak harm and destruction. And no one knows why they do it. Maybe it’s the twisted feeling of control and power it brings them, or maybe they really do just want to watch the world burn.

 

There are times like tonight when I feel scared and overwhelmed, just one feeble voice in the darkness. But this experience has galvanized so many, and I know I’m not the only one who thinks this world could be so beautiful. There is much to rebuild. But as hopeless as it seems, I haven’t given up yet. I hope you won’t, either.

 

Thomas

“Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him.’”

 

The one who doubted:

that was what they called me.

No one remembered

the bravery I had shown

on the way to Bethany—

bravery or was it despair I felt

remembering the failed revolutions

the cousins murdered

Miriam straining to deliver

and dying or ere they were born,

our two sons.

 

The eddies of dust

over which our fathers walked

in ages past are trampled under

by the eagle’s talons

luxury sits grinning and contented

in the temple

making a mockery of Abraham

and Abraham’s God

The flower of youth perishes

on the hilltops of Judea

and hope is a luxury

for fools and charlatans.

 

Yet there was one who was not hopeless

Quiet and resolved

Upon his dark brow lingered a celestial light.

Though we had been abandoned by all

He had not abandoned us

And I was resolved not to forsake him

Even with the expectation of death encroaching

Death sadistic and perverse.

 

So call me not doubting

for it wasn’t my faith that forsook me

on that night in the garden

when they led him away

when they bound him to a fiery wheel

when the hounds of hell stood baying

round the tree where he hung suspended

where the crude lance entered

and his mother lay pierced at the root

 

no, it wasn’t my faith.

it was hope.

 

hope was enshrouded

and lain in a tomb

and a stone was laid over its mouth

and into the whale’s jaws

poured the blackness of darkness

and the mountains of the sea were silent.

And the serpent of death

glutted and imposing

stretched its victorious coils

round the sleeping world.

 

*           *           *

 

When they talk about me

ages hence

this is all they will remember:

the scorn on my face

when I heard they had raised him

when they said he had been sighted

walking towards Emmaus

breaking bread and disappearing

amid quiet laughter.

 

Buoyed with renewed expectation

they floated together

and I stood alone on the seashore

and the stars of twilight twinkled

as the shadows gathered round me.

 

And whenever the story is told

they’ll laugh at me for not believing

though if you had been there with us

you’d have had your questions

and they all gathered round him

and I lingered at the edges

feeling faint with confusion and sadness

as the smell of frankincense and spikenard

filled the warm spring air.

 

And when the commotion settled

and the twelve spread apart

there he was

and he motioned me forward

and it wasn’t a ghost nor a trance

he was just as alive as he had been

three days before

and I had no idea how to account for that

because I had known all along he was going to die

and the best I could have hoped for was to die alongside him.

 

But when I saw the wrists

where the wounds of betrayal burned dully

when I dipped my hand in the well

where the waters of life had poured out

when I brushed the skin of my arms

against the hair on the back of his neck

the embers of injustice blew away into nothing

and bitterness exhausted itself and was silent.

 

Years from now

when my desire is finally granted

when my blood seeps over the barbaric stones

of some desolate isle

and my body grows cold and rigid

pierced by the four lances

I’ll stretch my stiffening sinews

Breathe a final prayer

And when death comes gliding over the seas to meet me

like a ghostly mirage of one I loved long ago

I’ll follow it fearless and undaunted

through the primordial depths

where the monsters of chaos will battle

until one comes to free them

and the dust of the tomb is plundered

and the relics are gathered from the shrines

and the bones are called out of the blackness.

And I’ll gaze on myself

and on them

as we gazed on him that night

credulous but believing

not understanding but no longer doubting

and we’ll walk together, tranquil and quiet,

on the shore of the sun-rimmed sea.

_________________________________

Jesus & J. K. Rowling: Imperfect Matchmakers

Well, it finally happened. Fans have speculated for years over the actual suitability of the series’ main characters for one another, but today Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling affirmed the contentious musings of Harry / Hermione shippers when she allegedly told Emma Watson, in a forthcoming issue of Wonderland Magazine, that the famous boy wizard should have married his best friend.

The Dark Side of Faith: When Religion Turns Tragic

“There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane—as a means of inciting evil . . . there may be no more potent force than religion.

 

“When the subject of religiously inspired bloodshed comes up, many Americans immediately think of Islamic fundamentalism, which is to be expected in the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. But men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist within all religions . . . Plenty of these religious extremists have been homegrown, corn-fed Americans.”

 

This quote is from the book Under the Banner of Heaven, by John Krakauer, the true story of two Mormon fundamentalists who murdered their sister-in-law and her baby daughter in cold blood because “God told them to do it.” (To this day, neither man professes remorse for the heinous crime).

A friend on Twitter recommended it to me yesterday because the story bears striking parallels to my own experience in the Kansas City prayer group as recounted in the current issue of Rolling Stone Magazine.

My friend is dead; she may have killed herself, or she may have been murdered. I honestly don’t know. But prior to her death the alleged murderer had strenuously argued that if God tells you to kill someone, you had better do it, because “God’s ways are higher than our ways.” Surely this is not without meaning.

Krakauer is right that there are fanatics in all religions. But some faith traditions breed fanaticism and ignorance more easily than others.

As he says later in the book, the most prominent strand in American Christianity for the last two centuries has been fundamentalism with a huge dash of end-times mania (“millenarianism”) mixed in. These are the sort of people who cut themselves off from the rest of the world in self-enclosed communities where one man’s word is the law and conventional notions about family, money, and sexuality are flouted at every turn.

They push the world away because they think they’ll be safer. It’s hard to think of anything they could have done that would be more dangerous.

 

It’s so frustrating, and when I think about it I start to get furious and overwhelmed. On Facebook a bunch of my friends from Southwestern, our alma mater, are asking what they could have done to help us; the answer is, probably not very much. That’s the nature of magical Christianity. As my friend Ryan said today in an email, “It’s a sad fact that in a lot of Christian circles you can get away with A LOT by saying, ‘God told me to do this.’” We’re trained to ignore resisters; we’re conditioned to follow prophets. This is a recipe for terror.

I wish I had an answer; I wish there was something I could do to make people safer, to ensure that the kind of tragedy that befell Bethany will never happen to anyone else. The trouble is, these disasters will continue to happen so long as people think they or the person above them has a direct line to God; so long as they continue to believe that “what our hearts think is evil, God calls holy”; so long as they buy into the teachings of these dime-store revolutionaries who are building a new world order on an edifice of blood and broken hearts.

“Love & Death in the House of Prayer” (a Rolling Stone Expose)

[ Cross posted on No Longer Quivering, a member of the Spiritual Abuse Survivor’s Network ]

Hello, everyone. I’m back from a month-long blogging break.

The big story of the day is this investigative piece by Jeff Tietz for Rolling Stone Magazine about the cult I was in and the loss of my best friend. He does an excellent job of explaining how the group formed and how it all went wrong, and paints a beautiful picture of Bethany as she was known to those who truly loved her.

Today I wrote this meditation on her death and the grand illusions that led the two of us to such a dangerous place. Tonight I wanted to share it. Here it is:

“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.” Bethany was both. Creatively gifted and unceasingly generous, she nourished me and so many other lost souls with her warmth, wisdom, and practicality.

We got into a fight shortly after we met because I viewed myself as the hero of some epic fantasy adventure. “Don’t make reality out to be a book, dear fellow,” she warned me, with a professorial air. “Books merely reflect life; they do not determine it. They have only power to show us in fresh ways what reality looks like.”

At the time I was furious, of course. How could she not know that we were both at the center of a great drama?

But over the next five years I saw a whole group of friends get pulled into a whirlpool of self-heroic narcissism. I witnessed at close quarters the devastating consequences of thinking that we can defy the natural laws of age and death. We were going to do what so many Christians before us had failed to do, because we were truly special. Bullets would bounce off of us; the devil would flee at our approach. A new world was about to begin, bathed in the glorious light of a cosmic revolution.

But in the midst of the hell that our leader created around us, amid the endless punishments and end-times training sessions, I remembered the words that Bethany had spoken six years earlier. And I realized that she had been right: I wasn’t a hero. I wasn’t special. I was just me. We, all of us, we had created this elaborate role-playing fantasy to escape the suffocating boredom of suburban life.

I got out. I left the group and learned how to be ordinary. And I truly believe that, given enough time, Bethany would have gotten out, too. I’m so sorry that the opportunity was stolen from her. I wish I could tell her how much her words and spirit have affected me, how I wish I had listened to her years before. All I can do now is to live in honor of her memory and hope that in time others will appreciate the astonishing legacy of her life and come to understand how it was cut so short.

The Secret of Good Fantasy is to Write Honestly

Photo Credit: Aine McVey

One of my goals for this year is to journal every day, which means I’ll probably be doing a lot more free-writing.

            I spent most of my Christmas break rewriting the first chapter of my book, just because I wanted to have a truly stunning first chapter. I finished it yesterday and sent it to three different people, seeking their opinions. It may need some revisions, but for the most part I actually really like it.

Some strange things happened as I was writing it. A few paragraphs into the chapter I realized that the only way forward was to talk about the fantasy stories I was dreaming up at around the time the novel begins. (Because the two main characters in these fantasies were fictional versions of me and *Rebecca, the fantasizing provides a commentary on the very real situations I’m describing).

Previously I had always been afraid to bring my imagination into the story because I felt it would alienate readers. (And also, I think, because *Timothy and Rebecca tried to tell me that my fantasies were evil and anti-social. Only in the last year have I begun rejecting the shame they spoke over me and embracing my calling as a storyteller).

What I found, though, was that being open about how much I used to fantasize actually made the story more realistic and grounded. Because the narrator is constantly explaining how he expects things to play out, watching them unfold in a much less dramatic way than he was anticipating creates a sense of realism. For example, there’s one moment in the first chapter where Rebecca has just finished giving a long speech about how reality is not a book, and I want so much to shake her hand and thank her for saying that, but I don’t. Instead, she goes into her room and shuts the door.

In earlier drafts of the novel, I would have been tempted to try and turn that into a big scene. But somehow, because it’s NOT a big scene (no matter how much I, the narrator, want it to be), it has more of an impact.

What surprised me even more is that, as the chapter was winding down, I found myself becoming obsessed with the most boring, minute, mundane aspects of the story. Reading back over it, my favorite moments are the dozens of small and apparently insignificant details, like the way Rebecca walks through the Cove with her hands in her back pockets, or how I say, “Hey,” and she doesn’t immediately respond, or how when we finish praying together I’m suddenly depressed because I’m afraid she’s going to admire me when all I wanted to do was to help her.

And yet the two BIG paragraphs that at first I was most excited about, the most poetic and “important” paragraphs in the chapter, fill me with an unsuppressed nausea. They don’t feel “real” to me in the way the smaller passages do.

And perhaps it’s just emblematic of a bigger change going on in my life. Because I grew up on Peter Jackson’s brilliant, amazing Lord of the Rings films, because those were my reality, I thought life would be full of grand gestures and vivid, emotional flourishes. I tried to shape reality to fit my preconceptions.

But over the last few months I’ve started to realize that reality is what it is, that there IS a real battle between good and evil but it takes place at the level of our mundane interactions. People have to eat and shower and do laundry and comb their hair and get their oil changed, pack their lunch in the morning and go to work each day. And for the most part we stand around looking bored and clueless, and there’s a lot of dead air in our conversations, and we accidentally talk over each other, and sometimes we don’t say what we mean to say and have to repeat ourselves, and we all spend twelve hours a day on Facebook and Twitter, and sometimes terrible things happen to people who didn’t deserve it, and that’s how life is, even if it’s not how it should be. But somehow God is gracious and we get to be heroes anyway.

And maybe in real life, being a hero is better than how it is in the movies, better and worse, because instead of battling sorcerers and Balrogs you have to fight REAL monsters, and that takes even more courage. I think I could stand up to a dragon; but after what I’ve been through in the last four or five years, no mythical creature will ever be quite as scary again. I’ve seen the face of true evil, and I think that smile will haunt my nightmares for a long time to come.

And I’m not giving up my love for fantasy, but as I get older the stories that continue to enchant me are the true ones: either those, like the novels of Tolkien, that radiate elemental truths about the nature of reality, or those like Harry Potter that take into account how people actually talk and think and feel and behave, so that I feel like I’m reading a real story about real people. Lousy case-of-the-week dramas, cheap end-times thrillers, and overblown Hollywood epics no longer interest me because they seem to be operating on an exaggerated and romantic notion of how the world should be rather than how the world is, and when I’m watching a movie the last thing I want to feel is concern for the writers, wondering whether they’ve ever had a real experience, whether they know anything about what life is like.

In the first chapter of my book I describe how Rebecca implored me to come out of my books and really experience reality instead of just reading about it. She taught me so much about how to live life, how to feel feelings, how to interact with real people. And to the extent that I didn’t figure out how to do that while she was living, I had to learn it in the aftermath of her death when every remaining illusion I had was shattered and I had to face the bitterness of mortality. She seemed to be fading into a fantasy more and more during our last years together, but because of her encouragement and example I was able to find my way back to reality. And I think I’ve “inherited” some of the pragmatism and realism she was always trying to pour into me (without a lot of success). That’s how I intend to live my life now. And when I finally sit down and write my fantasy novels, they’ll be weird and creative and surprising, of course, because I don’t think I can help being weird, but I want them to be true more than anything else, alive with the complexity and brokenness of ordinary life. And I think now they will be.

Sometimes Church is the Problem

In May 2011 I requested a meeting with a church leader about the terrible time I had been having.

I hadn’t eaten, really, in three weeks. I could barely sleep. Some nights I would just sit in my room and cry and cry as I thought about my life, about the kind of man I was, someone whose anger and hatred had left him alone and completely friendless. I cared about ideas more than I cared about people; and I realized I was heading towards the same miserable end as my hero, Charles Dickens, who had been so consumed by ambition that he couldn’t even see his own son trying to get his attention as he sat at his desk writing on the last day of his life.

But God in His mercy was trying to reach me. He had punished me for my selfishness. I read aloud the passage in Deuteronomy where He curses the Israelites who walk in disobedience. “The Lord will afflict you with madness, blindness, and confusion of mind; you shall grope about at noon as blind people grope in darkness, but you shall be unable to find your way; and you shall be continually abused and robbed, without anyone to help.”

“It’s great that you have that much clarity,” said *Mr. O’Connell. “But what have you done exactly?”

And I told him about my abusiveness and anger towards the people in my life who were trying to help me, how I refused to listen, how I was always turning the conversation around on them to make it look like they were the bad guys, and how it finally reached the point where, seven months earlier, the community I lived in had decided to shun me until I could learn how to treat people…

“Hold on,” said Mr. O’Connell, and he gave me a very serious expression. “Are you being punished?”

“No, it isn’t punishment,” I said sadly. “They’re trying to help me.”

*           *           *

Samantha Field had a great post on her blog today about how church can be a dangerous environment, how our theological systems protect abusers by telling their victims that everyone is equally horrible in God’s eyes because all sins are equally deserving of punishment, and haven’t we all done things that are wrong, and haven’t we all done things that have hurt others?

So everyone becomes a victim, and everyone becomes an abuser, and whatever defenses the abused might have had are stripped from them in the name of religion.

And it got me to thinking. There’s an uphill battle that so many abuse victims face, just being able to recognize that they’re being abused, let alone being equipped to resist it.

And this battle is made dramatically more difficult by a cultural environment that encourages people to think of themselves abusively, that rewards virtues like submission and obedience but discourages courage, emotional engagement, and critical thinking.

For example, I eventually realized that the community in which I was living was a dangerous cult; and that our leader was using me as a warning to the rest of the group about the dangers of questioning his authority. But clarity only came because I was willing to swim against the flow of Evangelical teaching, to think outside of the acceptable paradigms and “heart attitudes” that are supposed to characterize a true believer.

I’ve heard prominent small group leaders say you should never complain when you’re mistreated, because no matter what was done to you, it’s better than what you deserve. What you deserve is hell. So you should be grateful for what you’re getting, even if you don’t like it.

Grateful.

When I’m being ignored by everyone else in my house, when people throughout the country are told that I’m dangerous, when I’m told, “You’re being isolated until you get better” but not given any idea what this is supposed to look like or how long it will last, when I’m just sitting in my room waiting in permanent suspension… I should just accept that, because I deserve worse.

My friend who was driven to her death? She deserved to be honored and protected; to be treated with kindness; to be loved. Where I stop taking your religion seriously is when it tries to tell me she deserved what she ended up getting.

So yes, I’m angry about this.

I’m angry that, as one of my friends pointed out recently, our community was able to fly under the radar because we belonged to a larger community that’s also psychologically compromised, docile and submissive, predisposed to a certain ideology and resistant to anything that might challenge the accepted worldview.

I’m angry that real abuses are swept under the rug by people who have lost their capacity to recognize evil. Imagine if Harry and Hermione confronted a member of the Hogwarts faculty with their suspicions about another professor, only to be told, “There’s no need to worry; everyone is evil.” Within the world of the story, we would consider that sadistic. And yet real people facing real monsters are told this every day by pastors, counselors, and teachers.

I’m angry that young people are not given the training they need to resist evil. They’re so busy “battling demons” in the spirit realm that they’re left totally unequipped to deal with real monsters.

I’m angry that a place that should shelter and protect us is often the place where we’re most vulnerable.

I’m angry that the leaders who should have been helping us have left us easy prey for any wolf that passes.

This is not right. This is not just. This is not what Jesus wanted.

Song Friday: “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables”

December 2012. It was just a few weeks after Bethany’s death. The Christian group we had been a part of, the group that had become a cult, had been broken up.

Song Friday: “There Were Roses”

Continuing with our Celtic theme for this week, today I would like to share one of my favorite songs, “There Were Roses” by the Irish activist and balladeer Tommy Sands.

The song is a true story based on events in Tommy’s own life. He grew up during a time of civil war in Ireland between Protestants and Catholics. But one of his best friends (Allen Bell) was a Protestant, and another (Sean O’Malley) was a Catholic. The three friends vowed that the conflict would never get in the way of their friendship.

But then one night Allen was murdered. Enraged, the Protestant loyalists went looking for a Catholic to murder in retaliation. They ended up killing Sean, and Tommy was left friendless and devastated.

But in the midst of his grief, he wrote this song. This is the more famous version by Moloney, O’Connell, and Keane. It will break your heart.