May
15

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Naming: A Way of Seeing

Category: Bibliography, Poetry, Reflection Tags: , , , Leave a Comment

In her latest post Lauren wrote about literature’s ability to shape our perceptions of the world. The written word provides access points to God, to Truth; it conditions our vision. The literature we produce and read is part of our “making something of the world,”* our culture. Lauren wrote,

Art, and literary art, teaches us how to see the object.

One of the principle ways literature and, more broadly, language, helps us see is that it enables us to name. With language we can clothe shapeless and silent abstractions with the shapes and sounds of letters. When we name, we gain access to and, in a limited but surprisingly powerful way, authority over some of life’s great mysteries.

Like suffering.

I choose suffering as an example because I love the blues. The blues, more than any other musical form, took a whole people-group’s story of suffering and named it. The blues called African-American suffering “ugly,” “terrible,” and “unjust,” and, in so doing, made it sufferable. Blues musicians and blues poets labeled the absurdity of their pains; then they laughed at them.

In Jazz, Ken Burn’s ten-part documentary, Branford Marsalis describes the blues as follows:

The blues are about freedom. The blues are about freedom. There’s liberation in reality. When they talk about these songs, when they talk about being sad, the fact that you recognize that which pains you is a very freeing and liberating experience. It must be strange for other cultures where you spend most of your time trying to pretend like you don’t have any of these problems, any of these situations. When I hear the blues, the blues makes me smile.

Playing the blues, therefore, is a way of getting rid of the blues. When you give your enemy a name, you can combat it by choosing gratitude or hope or faith or courage. You dismantle fear of the unknown.

Such power is why Dumbledore always gave a name to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named; it is why, when Watson admits his fear during Conan Doyle’s first murder mystery, Holmes replies, “I can understand. There is a mystery about this which stimulates the imagination: where there is no imagination there is no horror;”** and, finally, it is why Jesus

took upon his lips a word of God in order to lament his Godforsakenness…Anybody who expresses his anguish and his dread in such a way that he makes the Word of God itself his witness is no longer groping and wandering about in some cosmic darkness, a deserted no man’s land. No, that person is praying within the church of God. …No, he is turning to and addressing someone; he is speaking to God himself about his forsakenness. …No, he cries, “My God, my God.” and so he still has God; the forsakenness is overcome in the very crying of it and he leaves it behind him.***

I’ll end with a poem by a great American blues poet, Langston Hughes. In “Trumpet Player” Hughes gives us the image of one who, though afflicted by a history of oppression, has come alive because of his ability to name his sufferings with the language of his horn.

Trumpet Player

The Negro
With the trumpet at his lips
Has dark moons of weariness
Beneath his eyes
Where the smoldering memory
Of slave ships
Blazed to the crack of whips
About thighs.

The Negro
With the trumpet at his lips
Has a head of vibrant hair
Tamed down,
Patent-leathered now
Until it gleams
Like jet-
Were jet a crown.

The music
From the trumpet at his lips
Is honey
Mixed with liquid fire.
The rhythm
From the trumpet at his lips
Is ecstasy
Distilled from old desire-

Desire
That is longing for the moon
Where the moonlight’s but a spotlight
In his eyes,
Desire
That is longing for the sea
Where the sea’s a bar-glass
Sucker size.

The Negro
With the trumpet at his lips
Whose jacket
Has a fine one-button roll,
Does not know
Upon what riff the music slips

Its hypodermic needle
To his soul-

But softly
As the tune comes from his throat
Trouble
Mellows to a golden note.

* See Culture Making by Andy Crouch.

** Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, vol. 1 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2012), 32.

*** Helmut Thielicke, Christ and the Meaning of Life, translated by John W. Doberstein (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1962), 45.

Michael Conner

About Michael Conner

I am pursuing my vocation as a pastor-poet by studying biblical literature at Indiana Wesleyan University and reading lots of Eugene Peterson, Mary Oliver, and Walter Brueggemann.

May
12

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Seeing

Category: Bibliography, Interpretation, Poetry, Prose Tags: , , , Leave a Comment

My boyfriend Nate and I saw The Great Gatsby over the weekend at a theater where we could drink along with the flappers. I thought Luhrmann’s interpretation of Fitzgerald’s novel was an absolute dream (heh.), except he went a little crazy with the symbols. Yes, yes, we know that the bespectacled billboard of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg represents the eyes of God. The 17-year-old version of myself knew that just as well.

Despite my annoyance, though, I thought that overt image did a great job of capping my week, my first week of summer classes.

One of those classes, Spirituality and the Arts, taught by the wonderful Greg Wolfe, editor of Image Journal, focused its Friday class on seeing. How does literature help us see? And what, then, do we see?

My favorite piece we read for Friday was an essay by Robert Cording called “Finding the World’s Fullness.” In it Cording writes about art being a mediation between consciousness and the object. Art, and literary art, teaches us how to see the object. A lot of the time that object is God; it’s Truth. Sometimes that Truth is impossible to see without the intermediary art, helping us along.

Toward the end of the essay, Cording alludes to a poem by Wallace Stevens called “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself,” which he believes exemplifies this well. Before I quote the poem, here’s Cording’s commentary:

[Stevens] is compelled to recognized that our experience tells us there is a reality outside our mind’s construction of it; and he is compelled to acknowledge that that reality, which lies outside the mind, can only be known inside the language the mind constructs for the reality. The truth of this poem and all poems that we value is not a proposition or judgement, not an insight that can be gained by simple transference, nor a message we can pass on to others, but rather an enactment of the bird’s cry.

Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow…
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier-mache…
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry–It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

About Lauren Sawyer

I am a student of theology and culture in Seattle, Washington. I love coffee, rainy days, and John Updike. Learn more about me at laurendeidra.com.

May
5

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A quick hi, and a poem

Category: Bibliography, Interpretation, Poetry Tags: , , Leave a Comment

Today is my final day of spring break, with summer term starting bright and early at 9 a.m. tomorrow. I was hoping to post more to this blog over break, but I found myself actually relaxing away from the computer for most of the two weeks, or starting my already-overwhelming summer term homework.

Fortunately, though, one of my summer courses, Spirituality and the Arts, will provide me with some beautiful prose and poetry to share on this blog for the weeks to come. (Hopefully, too, you’ll start hearing from my wonderful guest bloggers these next two months as well!) Here is a poem I read this morning that I think is absolutely brilliant. It’s by Scott Cairns and is from Image Journal (Summer 2001):

Adventures in New Testament Greek: Metanoia

Repentance, to be sure,
but of a species far
less likely to oblige
sheepish repetition.

Repentance, you’ll observe,
glibly bears the bent
of thought revisited,
and mind’s familiar stamp

–a quaint, half-hearted
doubleness that couples
all compunction with a pledge
of recurrent screw-up.

The heart’s metanoia,
on the other hand, turns
without regret, turns not
so much away, as toward,

as if the slow pilgrim
has been surprised to find
that sin is not so bad
as it is a waste of time.

 

Some quick thoughts: I love the repetition of sounds in the first two stanzas, emulating the idea of repentance as something done repetitively, not once and for all. And then the final stanza’s slant rhyme is beautiful, playful. Instead of portraying metanoia as grim or guilt-ridden, it’s portrayed as being freeing, natural, awakening. (Amen!)

 

About Lauren Sawyer

I am a student of theology and culture in Seattle, Washington. I love coffee, rainy days, and John Updike. Learn more about me at laurendeidra.com.

May
1

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Possibilities of Transformation

Category: Bibliography Tags: , 1 Comment

So the arts are showing us [...] the possibilities of transformation. I think it’s one of the great contributions of the arts, that they can show us possibilities. They can show us how things could be, even in this world.

-Jeremy Begbie, musician and professor of theology at Duke

Apr
24

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And this is a religious sensation

Category: Bibliography, Prose Tags: , , Leave a Comment

Fiction is rooted in an act of faith: a presumption of an inherent significance in human activity that makes daily life worth dramatizing and particularizing. There is even a shadowy cosmic presumption that the universe–the totality of what is, which includes our subjective impressions as well as objective data–composes a narrative and contains a poem, which our own stories and poems echo.

The impulse of praise–or its inverse, lament and execration–motivates literature at its deepest and most simple and noble; even those who see nothing to praise admire in others the results of this impulse. The writer’s most important asset is not wisdom or skill but an irrational, often joyous sense of importance attaching to what little he knows; and this is a religious sensation.

–John Updike, speaking on religion and contemporary American literature at IUPUI in Indianapolis, Indiana, 1994

Apr
22

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Books as Prophets–thoughts on Gail Godwin’s “The Good Husband”

Category: Bibliography, Interpretation, Prose, Reflection Leave a Comment

The difference between your Miss or Mr. Literal-mind and the Prophet/Poet is simply this: To Miss Literal-mind, a seed is a seed. She shakes it out of its Burpee packet, covers it with dirt, waters it faithfully, and achieves her petunia. That’s all she aspired to: a petunia. … But when our Prophet considers the lowly mustard seed, what he sees is the growth process of the human spirit: how a tiny, insignificant beginning can grow into a luxuriant shrub capable of sheltering others.

– Magda Danvers from the fictitious Book of Hell: An Introduction to the Visionary Mode in Gail Godwin’s The Good Husband

About fifteen minutes after I finished Gail Godwin’s book The Good Husband, I was out in the pouring Seattle rain, walking from the bus stop on Leary Way up to King’s Hardware, a bar. I felt so sad; I was already missing Godwin’s characters, wishing I could read more–how about a second epilogue?–but accepting the last sentence of the book as final.

I enjoyed reading this book, and I knew I wanted to write a blog post about it. But when I closed it, put on my rain boots, and headed to the bar, it became obvious that I couldn’t. How dare I write a single post about such a lovely book? Do I dare analyze it to death?

I’ve come to regard all texts as sacred in their own way. And when something is sacred, it’s not so easy to approach. But because it’s sacred, you must approach it. This is my dilemma.

 

What I know I can say about The Good Husband is that it made me think of postmodernism. I’ve read that in postmodern literature, the author makes her presence known. While in modern literature, you might forget the author even exists as you get sucked up in the narrative; in postmodern literature, you’re continually reminded that there’s a mastermind behind the prose.

So in The Good Husband, the reader gets this sense that a character in the book–Hugo Henry, a writer–is writing the book itself. It’s because Hugo talks about how he wants to emulate another book, The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, a book that’s plot and characters sound awfully similar to those of The Good Husband. 

(I should note that as I was writing this, I made the mistake of going to Godwin’s Wikipedia page. It turns out my analysis is correct, but incomplete. See for yourself.)

I say all that to consider how this book is in its own way a prophet. What if books were prophets?

The Good Husband in particular feels prophetic, because it keeps drawing attention to itself. It reminds you that it is a book being written. It’s full of beginnings, middles, and ends. And it reminds you that other books too are prophets. In fact, it’s books within the book–The Book of Hell by Magda Danvers and A Month with the Manigaults by Hugo Henry–that bring the novel’s two couples together.

The Good Husband declares things, like a prophet. And then, later on, characters remember the declarations and repeat them.

A favorite quote from this book is said by Laurence, Hugo’s son’s partner. Hugo remembers it chapters later, writing it in a letter to his wife:

“We can’t grow up,” says Laurence,

we can’t escape our tormentors, we can’t be free, until we can express ourselves well enough to be heard by others, can we? Only then can we tell our story. And only by convincingly telling our story can each of us do our bit to help the world grow up.

The quote is drawing in on itself, while expelling out into the world. It’s only by reading stories–like this book, like stories lived out–can the world grow up and change. The book is convicting itself of this–and it’s also convicting its audience. You tell these stories. You write your own.

I wonder now if the heavy sacredness I felt for this The Good Husband while walking from the bus stop to the bar has to do with its profoundly prophetic voice. It was telling me to do something, though I wasn’t completely aware of what. Maybe all I need to do is what I always do, the very thing I fear: write about the book. Tell others what it means to me. And then, loan it out. Recommend it on Goodreads. Purchase it for a friend.

 

About Lauren Sawyer

I am a student of theology and culture in Seattle, Washington. I love coffee, rainy days, and John Updike. Learn more about me at laurendeidra.com.

Apr
17

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Forgiveness and Repentance (Remembering Brennan Manning)

Category: Bibliography, Prose, Reflection Tags: , , , Leave a Comment

It is always beneficial to acknowledge that books can be deceptive. The most lyrical prose on the furious longing of God creates the illusion that we have already arrived at beatitude. Then after reading a paragraph or so, you have to return to the sheer ordinariness of your life, to days that bring the same thing over and over again, the drudgery of routine; as the Buddhists say, “the laundry.” Rather than being appalled by the discontinuity between the poetic and interesting and the prosaic and mundane, it serves well to fasten on the utter delight of a loving God who is deeply touched that, in the brouhaha of your busy life, you would devote even five minutes to spiritual reading.

-Brennan Manning, The Furious Longing of God

Last weekend one of my favorite writers, Brennan Manning, passed away. His writing has given me the space to think of God as more than just some deity with a to-do and a not-to-do list. Maybe God really loves me, and even likes me.

I had been a Christian six years before I learned what grace was. I remember being at a beach with Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel, whispering to my friend Jacque, “Is this true?” Does grace mean I’m forgiven even before I repent? This had never, ever, ever, been taught to me–or perhaps I never heard it–until I read that book.

I’m finishing up Peter Rollins’s The Orthodox Heretic, a book of tales or parables. This morning I read Rollins’s retelling of the Parable of the Lost Son, where instead of the prodigal son feeling awful about his squandering before he reunites with his father, he repents after the feast. Rollins notes in the commentary that really this is how the Biblical parable is told, but we don’t often read it that way. We really don’t know if the prodigal son is ready to turn his life around when he returns home; we just know he’s run out of money and is sick of eating pig feed. Either way, the father is ready to embrace him–forgiveness before repentance.

I like Manning’s quote from above, because it’s so true for me. When I read something profound in an essay or book for class, my mind is blown for about 20 minutes until I forget about it and move on with my day. The quotes I remember from books tend to be those that impact me enough to become part of a story, like the one I told about Jacque and me on the beach. I think that’s when books lose that deceptive power. They’re no longer something nice you read on a Sunday afternoon. They become stories you tell, stories you live.

About Lauren Sawyer

I am a student of theology and culture in Seattle, Washington. I love coffee, rainy days, and John Updike. Learn more about me at laurendeidra.com.

Apr
15

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Let Go of Safety

Category: Bibliography, Prose Tags: , 1 Comment

“Plato spoke of the necessity for divine madness in the poet.  It is a frightening thing to open oneself to this strange and dark side of the divine; it  means letting go of our sane self-control, that control which gives us the illusion of safety.  But safety is only an illusion, and letting it go is part of listening to the silence, and to the Spirit.”

- Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

Apr
8

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“Fishing in the Keep of Silence” by Linda Gregg

Category: Bibliography, Poetry Tags: , , Leave a Comment

There is a hush now while the hills rise up
and God is going to sleep. He trusts the ship
of Heaven to take over and proceed beautifully
as he lies dreaming in the lap of the world.
He knows the owls will guard the sweetness
of the soul in their massive keep of silence,
looking out with eyes open or closed over
the length of Tomales Bay that the herons
conform to, whitely broad in flight, white
and slim in standing. God, who thinks about
poetry all the time, breathes happily as He
repeats to Himself: There are fish in the net,
lots of fish this time in the net of the heart.

Apr
5

By

Why I want to teach

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I want to be a professor.

The journey that has led me to declare that now without the caveat–”You know, sometime down the road”–has been a crazy one. But now it seems most true and beautiful.

Nate and I do this thing. He sits outside on our back patio, smoking a cigarette, while I sit on our bed just inside the slightly-opened door. And we talk. We have our best conversations this way. We talk about life, sometimes, and cosmology, psychology, and theology. One night last week we talked about the Bible, and how people have come to simplify everything. We talked about divorce. Instead of trying to understand the culture of Jesus’ audience when he said do not get a divorce, some Christians have taken these words to mean “No, not ever.”

(Very shortly: There were a crazy amount of divorces happening during the Second Temple period, because it was so easy for Jewish men to divorce their wives. Thus, there were many woman stranded with no means of income. So they would have to beg, prostitute themselves, or something similar. So of course Jesus would say this. And I’m sure, too, He meant: take marriage seriously. Don’t be a dick. Don’t screw people over.)

What’s most frustrating about this simpleton’s reading of the Bible is that it’s taught. Churches, moms, and dads don’t teach their kids to think, to ask questions, to wonder about why this or that happened in the Bible. Instead, they’re taught that the Bible is infallible. So anything that sounds weird, well, you’ve just gotta trust the Lord! (As one of my counseling professors duly noted: I seem to have some bitterness toward Christianity.)

Anyway, this conversation led me to my rally cry: THAT IS WHY I NEED TO TEACH!

I said to Nate, “I don’t know what I would have done if it weren’t for some college professors who taught me how to think! I’m not sure I’d be here now [in Seattle, at a 'progressive' seminary].” Read into that what you will.

And then I said to Nate, rather impressively, “That’s why I want to teach fiction, too. I think it teaches us how to ask questions.”

By this point, I’m on a roll.

“I think characters ask questions that I didn’t think to ask. Or, characters ask the questions I’m too afraid to ask!”

Then I said what seemed to be a non-sequitur: “Asher Lev!”

That is to say, that Jewish boy asked questions of the interplay of the sacred and the secular, something I had been toying with for a few years. My Name is Asher Lev helped me wrestle with that again and even come to some conclusions (or at least “talk it out”).

Fiction is a powerful, powerful gift. I know it’s hard to prove media effects–if I learned anything in my college mass comm class–but I’m pretty convinced that good literature can shape theology. (At least, my theology.)

And that is why I want to teach.

About Lauren Sawyer

I am a student of theology and culture in Seattle, Washington. I love coffee, rainy days, and John Updike. Learn more about me at laurendeidra.com.

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