The Beats, Religious De/Re-Construction, and the Politics of Pathos

(An Autobiographical Ramble)

Trigger Warning: The following post rogram contains frank though non graphic discussion of sex, homophobia, queerphobia, racism, and pedophilia. I will warn y’all when we get to the really gnarly bits, but reader discretion is advised

A lot of my fellow Christian and Christian adjacent folks, particularly those of us in the queer community, are in the process of deconstructing their relationship to the conservative Christianities they were brought up to believe in. Some end up reconstructing something new within a Christian paradigm, and some end up finding another religious faith or deciding religion simply isn’t for them. As I’ve reflected on this trend, I realize that my story is different than many of my peers. Not better or worse, just different. And I want to talk about it. I’m realizing more and more that my approach to becoming a fully self-realized queer Christian spiritual worker was mediated by my journey through the Beats. For those who aren’t familiar, the Beats or Beat movement were a group of artists and writers in the 1940s and 50s who served as one of the countercultural voices prefiguring the hippie movements of the 1960s.There are many common threads I could trace in my journey, but almost all of them touch on the Beats, both the Beat canon and the Beat ways of understanding the world and my place in it. At a time when exvangelical wasn’t really a thing, I couldn’t exactly look to contemporary voices on my journey of self-discovery. Instead I looked back to stranger voices, mediated by kind mentors who were either survivors of that time or were kin to those who were. Let me tell you a story.

I. “Forbidden” Fruit

Growing up near Boulder, I was exposed to New Age culture and spirituality by osmosis. New Age was seen by my conservative church as a spiritual symptom of the non-Christian world’s depravity. Even as a kid, I don’t know how much I agreed with this ideology. I definitely found New Age spirituality foreign and unsettling at times, and for that reason I definitely judged it by the rhetoric I was taught. But if you had asked me what was “wrong” with it, other than an appeal to monotheism over polytheism, I’m not sure I could have told you. What I think I’m trying to say is that it also had a kind of fascination for me. Perhaps it was the forbidden fruit, but there was also a sensuality and a beauty to much of its imagery which was not reflected in my stoic Reformed evangelical upbringing (except perhaps in a few spiritual retreats).

I will here somewhat use New Age ideas and the hippie movement as a bridge to talking about the Beats, even though the two movements were distinct in their own ways.

Somewhere lost in the mists of time and my consciousness was a point of disaffection with the evangelical Christianity I was raised in. Somehow, even at age 14, I began to ask some of the questions that many of my peers would not ask until high school or college. I think some of this was rooted in the disconnect I felt between the very personal, earthy evangelicalism of my church’s youth group and the abstract, austere evangelicalism of what was preached on Sundays. In search of my own becoming, and in search of a spirituality more like what my friends and I were beginning to learn and practice, a spirituality that made the gospel story come alive, I paradoxically began to look outside of Christianity.

Around this time, I read Huston Smith’s “The World’s Religions”. A quick Google search reveals that Huston Smith was active in the counterculture of the 1960s and was influenced by Timothy Leary and others who were themselves influenced by the Beats. Though Smith’s book is by no means partial, there was a kind of sensibility which got at the spiritual ethos and yearnings of different world religions in a way that flat prose about their beliefs and practices did not. I detect now in his work the same kind of curiosity about the human spirit that motivated the Beats. His accounts of Buddhism and Raja yoga were the first accounts that were compelling enough for me to try those traditions  as solutions to my existential angst with Christianity. They did not resolve my desire for intimate relationship with the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and the Apostles, but they did teach me valuable practices of contemplation, which helped me to ground the faith I had been cultivating in a sensibility of discovery and practice, rather than the austere passivity I had been taught.

In middle and high school, I had a few teachers who served as personal mentors to me. One, my science teacher, had herself lived through the anti-war movements of the 60s and 70s that the Beats had culturally been predecessors to, along with other more “on the ground” activists. She taught us how to think rather than what to think, and she would often go on long, inspired tangents about the power of human creativity, curiosity, and love to change the world. After these tangents, she would always half-jokingly apologize, asking us to tell her when she got off track. We never did, because these long dialogues were profoundly meaningful to us.

In high school, my social studies teacher was a blacksmith, historian and storyteller. I worked long hours in his metal forge at an apprenticeship, and he taught me how to better understand the historical component of the beliefs and worldviews that shape us as human beings. He also instilled in me a love of myth for its archetypal value. He gave me books from the New Wave science fiction movement of the 50s-70s, a movement which gave technology a back seat role to the exploration of consciousness, community, belonging, and “inner space” just as early sci fi had focused on “outer space”. There was an anarchic streak running through these writers, just as there had been in the Beats before them. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but also long meandering discourses on the meaning of life, the limits of human capacity, and our reaching for something like wholeness.

II. Queer Lightning - Ginsberg’s “Howl”

In 8th grade English class, I was exposed to Allen Ginsberg’s seminal poem, Howl, and it shattered my preconceived notions of what poetry could be. Even as a beginning free verse poet myself, the sheer anguish, lyricism, improvisational freedom and intensity of “Howl” shook me up in all the right ways. I wouldn’t have had words for it at the time, but Ginsberg’s voice screamed from the rooftops about the kind of alienation and self-fragmentation I could only whisper about to myself in my own heart as a vague sense of dread. I could not relate to the material conditions Ginsberg found himself and his beloveds in, but I could relate to the deep loneliness, anger and yearning he expressed as a lover trying to survive in a totalizing world of capitalist white supremacist patriarchy. That feeling of relation/identification was more than teenage melodrama. I think the alienation many especially white adolescents face is a symptom of the deeper social “madness” caused by oppressive systems which Ginsberg alluded to in his poem. For me personally, “Howl” was an emotional grasping at realities and knowledges that entangled and banged against each other in my psyche and my body.

The homoerotic current in Howl was not one I necessarily had conscious opinions on at the time, but I don’t doubt that it was one that my body and my eros responded to. As a boy myself only just beginning to realize his love and yearning for other boys, Ginsberg’s explicit references to male sexuality and his more tender homosocial and homoerotic lines to Carl Solomon cascaded through my subconscious like a flash of queer lightning. It pointed to something far vaster and stranger in my own desire, something that Ginsberg had and something that I felt a kind of similarity and solidarity with.

In terms of sexuality, the homoerotic elements of the Beats continued to influence me in unconscious ways, and their frank treatment of sexuality and sexual hedonism was, I think, an unrecognized lifeline for me. Purity culture, though far less violent on men than women, had mostly succeeded in cutting me off from my own desire. I feel that my internalization of its norms created a split within me. This split caused me to project my romantic and relational desires onto my attraction to women and my sexuality onto my attraction to men. I then subconsciously framed my sexuality as a target for repression. But The Beats kept me honest in spite of myself, and even if I internalized sexual repression, their sexual liberation was part of what kept me from buying into purity culture as a moral good. I remember in particular being deeply moved by passages in from Beat poet Michael McClure’s “Fuck Ode,” an earthy, graphic depiction of sex in stream-of-consciousness poetry not dissimilar to a modern day Song of Songs.

The blend of sexuality, spirituality and even references to drug use created for me a kind of breathing space. As an adolescent still struggling to even know what I wanted out of my life and love, here were creatives and spiritualists who radically expanded my notions of what it was possible to want. I knew that while I didn’t aspire to the level of hedonism or rebellion they embodied, the fact that they lived out such a wild life proved that whatever I personally aspired to was possible without extinction. That whatever I wanted to do or be, it was never going to be quite as radical as these creatives I admired, so I may as well begin to push the limits of my own desire and becoming.

III. (Beat)itude

At age 15, I went downtown to the Boulder Bookstore and bought an Anthology of Beat Poets. Founded by David Bolduc, himself an acquaintance of Allen Ginsberg, the Boulder Bookstore was the intellectual crossroads for my own journey of deconstruction and discovering my own authentic spirituality and identity. As I kept following in the footsteps of Huston Smith and the Beats, I became an amateur Zen Buddhist. It was here that I bought my first anthology of Zen koans, puzzling over the refreshing riddles of the Rinzai sect in hopes of having some sort of epiphany. Later, I came back and bought my first collection of Sufi poetry, a little pocket-sized book of poems by Jalal Ad-Din Rumi. I began to fine tune my spiritual compass back towards a theistic mystical practice centered in the Abrahamic faiths I was more familiar with. The Beat anthology contained hits from Ginsberg, as well as many other Beats whose names I had heard and ones I hadn’t. From the spiritual side of things, I was moved by Diane di Prima’s poem “I Fail as a Dharma Teacher,” a poem detailing her own journey of success and failure to practice Buddhism, along with a luminous reflection on the hope of seeing joy and liberation in the midst of a world of sorrow. I imitated this poem, substituting the now Christian and Jewish traditions I had tuned my compass to, with an ekphrastic piece entitled “I fail as an Anabaptist Celtic Abbot”. The Beats had a tendency to seek meaning and liberation from the status quo through a return to textured mysticism and ancient religious traditions, even if their use of those traditions was sometimes problematic. This resourcing of timeless wisdom deeply influenced my ongoing process of religious deconstruction. For a change of pace, I first threw myself into the farthest reaches from Christianity I could think of,  mainly Buddhism, certain forms of Hinduism, and neo-paganism. Periodically, I would find books at BB or the library that put these traditions in dialogue with Xtianity. “Zen for Christians” was a short, potent text whose mantra has stuck with me as a reminder of non-duality: “Life is a mess, but it’s ok anyway.”

As I came to understand what it was in my early formation I was rejecting and what it was I wanted to preserve, I homed in on mysticisms, monasticisms and contemplative practices in the Abrahamic faiths. As I began to discover that my faith still lay in some form of relationship to Christ and a mystical practice of Christianity, I did the same hermeneutical and epistemic work that the Beats did, applying it to my own tradition. I studied church history, monasticism, small counter cultural traditions within Christian history and in the present. At age 16, I attempted to start a theology group with some of my youth group friends for mutual prayer, conversation, and sharing of our findings. I gave one talk on “the lost history of Christianity,” centering on the Oriental Orthodox Churches, Anabaptist pacifism and politics. I gave another talk on mysticism in Celtic and Eastern Christianity. After that, word reached an unnamed pastor in our church who pressured our youth group leaders to shut this group down. We continued to meet as a church small group, but the theology club fell apart.

IV. Almost Like the Blues

In 2014, Leonard Cohen, himself a contemporary of the Beats, released his album “Popular Problems.” In the opening track, he growls the following lines:

I saw some people starving

There was murder, there was rape

Their villages were burning

They were trying to escape

I couldn't meet their glances

I was staring at my shoes

It was acid, it was tragic

It was almost like the blues

It was almost like the blues

It occurs to me that the Beats, though an interracial movement, might be the closest that white writers have come to something like the blues. Black liberation theologian James Cone describes the blues as the unique heritage of black resistance and a celebration of life in the midst of the dehumanization caused by white supremacy. He states in no uncertain terms that whites cannot experientially understand the blues, and he is right. Yet if we examine what it might have been like for the white oppressor to begin to reclaim their own humanity, to betray  and defect from white hegemony, we might imagine that positive betrayal would sound something like the Beats. A kind of tearing at the fabric of white self-imposed alienation, a celebration of both rage and beauty that the normative social order sought to control and erase. The fact that it was not always perhaps as healthy as the blues shows the effects of whiteness on the psyche of its subjects. There are wounds there, and woundedness sometimes perpetuates itself even as it reaches for healing. The fact remains though that the Beat movement touched certain heights of pathos, authenticity, yearning and resistance. This shows that it truly struck a chord of liberation, a chord which helped spark an entire counterculture. I am speaking highly tentatively here, but it seems to me that there are two roads by which this movement may have been able to begin to break free from white hegemony: those roads are Queer resistance, and productive slippage by communities at the edges of white assimilation. 

I will explain the second road first. Some of the founders of the Beat movement were assimilated as white Americans but came from communities that had only been partially assimilated and whose “allegiance” to the fiction of whiteness had been periodically called into question. Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso were Roman Catholic, and Corso was specifically Italian-American Roman Catholic. Italians and Catholics had been persecuted by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, and had begun to be assimilated by Corso and Kerouac’s time, but one imagines there would still be a sense of being somewhat “outsider” to WASP culture, particularly for Corso as a child of first generation immigrants. Ginsberg, Hettie Jones (nee Cohen) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti were Jewish. Willie Jennings, a black theologian and professor at Yale, has written an extensive meditation on the complex, sometimes fraught but often mutually empowering relationship between black Americans and white Jewish Americans. Jennings’ research on the subject is expounded in his book Christian Imagination, a text about the theological underpinnings of race and racial capitalism. He names the ways that black and Jewish arts have mingled together to form myriad commentaries on identity, belonging and community in the midst of white supremacist alienation. It is beyond the scope of my expertise to trace all of these threads. But Ginsberg, as a prime example, relies heavily on imagery from his Jewish heritage to critique American hegemony and the kind of psychic violence it does on its perpetrators and its victims. Consider the elaborate equation of white American capitalism with the anti-Hebrew deity of child sacrifice, Moloch, in the lines of Ginsberg’s “Howl”. Black members of the Beats were fewer and further between, but those who participated certainly contributed the insight of their lived experience to the ongoing cry of resistance against the post-war American white hegemonic machine. Taken together, these voices brought a context and an awareness that the world of white hegemony was not all that there was, and they began to imagine new paths towards belonging, tangled and fraught though such paths often were.

The other road, queer resistance, was equally energized in the Beat movement, in ways that contemporary queer theorists and activists often struggle to meaningfully categorize and reckon with. William S. Burroughs was perhaps the most unlikely progenitor and forerunner of a movement like the Beats. He came from a fairly wealthy white Protestant American background, went to Harvard University, and even enlisted in the army to fight in WWII (although he was not chosen to serve). Nevertheless, Burroughs’ lived experiences and desires set him on a course to the Beats. Burroughs had many sexual encounters with both men and women, and was open to the point of graphic description about many of these encounters, whether in autobiographical or fictionalized form.

 Many years after my initial encounter with the Beats, in my first year of seminary, I picked up a copy of Burroughs’ book, The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead. The Wild Boys is a stream-of-consciousness novel about young gay guerilla warriors on roller blades taking down a post-apocalyptic dictatorship. Though not quite as scattered as his more famous novel, Naked Lunch, both books share Burroughs’ penchant for graphic descriptions of gay sex with an unabashed literary delight. I would not have been ready for Burrough’s crass beauty during my initial encounter with the Beats, but reading The Wild Boys as an out bisexual man, I found it haunting, moving and luminous. It comes out of a lived experience of the joy of gay sexuality and homoerotic social bonds, a shared experience from which my own life has been greatly enriched. Yet Burroughs had an ambivalent  relationship to self-identifying as gay or bisexual. Some of this may be due to the lack of shared queer identity consciousness that would later coalesce around events like the Stonewall riots. Still it’s worth naming that in America at least, many of the sexually ambiguous Beat authors laid the cultural groundwork for queer desire and kinship to be a thing that the art world could express in language openly. Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac all had intimate sexual relations with each other, while in many cases also being married to wives. The relative harmony and disharmony of these relationships is complex, but nonetheless they existed. Jamie Russell, a literary journalist, writes that Burroughs inhabited a “gay subjectivity” which has been troubling to queer theorists. While I’ve not read Russell’s work, I can extrapolate what Russell is referring to. In Burroughs in particular and in the Beats more broadly, there is a lack of interest in identifying with a named gay or queer community. Inasmuch as queer theory posits a shared experience and gay activism posits a shared community, the Beats in many ways feel like a disappointment to modern queer thinkers. Living in a time before the full emergence of queer consciousness, they were a small part of laying its foundation. More specifically, their frank and unabashed openness in discussing queerness and sexuality at all in front of a largely white audience began to break open the stranglehold white hegemony held over sexuality, kinship and identity, particularly though not exclusively for white people. Queer writers who could speak openly about their experience turned the stigma and scandal of non-hetero sex and gender into a sword that sliced open the fabric of midcentury capitalist nuclear family values and tore a hole to greater freedom and conscientization of their audience. The downside, however, is that a sword can cut both ways. 

V. The Dark Side of the Beats 

(TW: Discussion of Sexual Abuse and Pedophilia)

Here seems as good a time as any to acknowledge some of the failings of Beat sexuality. The first failing, though not strictly the fault of either party, was the falling out between the Beats and figures like Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) who were leading parallel traditions of black radicalism and liberation. There is some evidence to suggest that Baraka had some same-sex encounters during his Beat years, but his later writings equated white hegemony with the perceived effeminacy of white queer masculinity, asserting over-against it the pure strength and conscience of black masculinity. While the queer subjectivity of the Beats allowed a great deal of freedom for queer expression eluding censure, it also allowed participants to disavow their kinship with it for other political reasons. It could not be all things to all people.

Another failing was the way in which Beat sexuality also reproduced certain patterns of Orientalism and colonialism. Burroughs, for example, sought out enclaves of more socially liberal sexual practice in places like the Tangier International Zone. Though he spoke fondly and positively of these communities, the experience of a white man entering historically non-white countries for the purposes of sexual tourism still capitulates to fetishizing and the unquestioned white access to non-white bodies, even if the white man in question is queer. One is reminded of the exploits of Lord Byron (a Romantic admired by some Beats). On the one hand, Lord Byron encouraged and supported the Greek liberation movement, and campaigned alongside Greeks for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. On the other hand, Lord Byron also expressed his bisexuality through sexual institutions like the hamams, or Turkish baths. These institutions were exoticized and fetishized by white Orientalist outsiders. Furthermore, many of the boys Byron met at the baths were only made available to him because of the subjugation of non-Turkish peoples by the Ottomans insiders, through practices such as the Ottoman slave trade and the paidomazoma, or “child harvesting,” the kidnapping of Balkan Christian boys to serve in Ottoman military and social institutions. 

Finally, it is worth naming the most egregious sin of Beat sexuality which, though not shared by all the Beats, was nonetheless unfortunately common: the tendency of advocating pederasty and pedophilia. Ginsberg was a noted member of NAMBLA, and some other Beat and Beat adjacent writers were either members themselves or wrote approvingly of the concept of pederasty. In naming this trend, it is perhaps best to follow feminist writer Andrea Dworkin’s critique of Ginsberg, that 

“I did think he was a civil libertarian. But, in fact, he was a pedophile. He did not belong to the North American Man/Boy Love Association out of some mad, abstract conviction that its voice had to be heard. He meant it. I take this from what Allen said directly to me, not from some inference I made. He was exceptionally aggressive about his right to fuck children and his constant pursuit of underage boys”. 

Of these faults and of the advocacy for them there is no defense. Though some of the liaisons Beat poets cultivated were legal (if unbalanced in power due to an age gap), they were nonetheless problematic by proximity to the predatory pursuit of youth. Yet it may be helpful to also name that blanket censure of queer sexuality may have created an environment where predatory bad actors (both in and out of the Beats) wielded undue power in the shadows. When the choice of a young queer person struggling to discover themselves is a choice between practicing unsafe sex with someone more powerful or continuing to repress, desperation can lead to concerning outcomes. This, of course, does not excuse the abusers by any means, but it may be instructive to society that abusers will have less room to operate if healthy sexual expression between adult equals is not censured. I was blessed to have been born in a less repressed era, and to have not been put into situations such as these as a teenager still coming to understand my queerness. Being young in a context that, while still far from fully liberated, was far less repressed than the 50s, I did not pick up on the pedophilic undertones in some of the Beats. Had I done so, I have no doubt I would have been as repulsed then as I am now by those undertones. For all the help that the rest of the Beat canon was to my own healthy self-discovery, however, I cannot reject the movement as a whole, as it contains some valuable truth, particularly in relation to queerness. Having acknowledged problems, I will now turn to more of the successes of Beat queer sexuality.

VI. Eros and the Politics of Pathos

There is a deep homosocial-turned-homoerotic current in Burroughs and the Beats which points in an revelatory way to the unhindered possibilities of sexuality, eros, and intimacy. Existing in a time before queer political identity labels, one can almost envision in the Beats a time far from now when we can describe our experiences with terms but no longer need to label them as over-against any other experience because full justice and liberation is achieved. When people can desire whoever they might ethically desire, can experiment, and can inhabit a multiplicity of erotic, sexual and social possibilities without having to commit to any one particular frame of explaining them except their own unique personhood and whatever terms are helpful. As a teenager, I found this gay subjectivity invaluable. Not because it convinced me that I wasn’t queer (although that may have been a thought that crossed my mind early on), but because it allowed me to inhabit through literary worlds of shared affection what it felt like to be gay, bi and queer without having to stake my claim on a label and deal with the repercussions thereof before I was ready. At the same time, the vigor, joy and earnestness of Beat queerness, as I said before, kept me honest. I rejected out of hand the toxic closeted “straight” bro culture (apart from a brief self-repression my first semester of college) because I saw in the Beats and others that whether or not I could accept calling myself queer at the time, my experience of queer desire and the sensual enhancement it brought to my life and friendships were things to be celebrated. 

More broadly, I think the Beats taught me much about the politics of pathos. While you can’t build a movement entirely on sentiment, I think many of my fellow leftists (especially young white leftists) are motivated largely by anger and a kind of cynical pragmatism, and are unable to see the transformative power of pathos, vulnerability, affection and delight. Where is our leftist joy? Where is our leftist love? Following Audre Lorde and the early Church, I understand eros as the human drive towards the fullness of life. Though the Beats were often anguished and often angry, their writing speaks profoundly to the power of positive pathos, affection and affectibility to point to new visions of change. This reminds me of a phrase that has floated around Tumblr: “not gay as in ‘happy’, but queer as in ‘I love you.’” The Beats at their best point to what new hope and creative solutions we can find when we are moved by our kinship with one another to seek wholeness and liberation. When Allen Ginsberg writes to Carl Solomon, “I’m with you in Rockland mental institution”, there is a profound identification at pointing towards a love that creates solidarity. The Beats create an affective world which, in a queer way, points to the possibility of life being  something other than the totalizing course of white hegemony we see around us. As queer theorist Jose Esteban Munoz suggests, queerness points to a utopic, prophetic “there and then” which disrupts the tyranny of the now by teaching us to yearn and work for something better and more beautiful. The Beats, utilizing both queer and non-queer currents, enact a similar prophetic pointing. The fact that their writing was one force in bringing the work of political radicals to broad cultural attention shows that there is power in pathos, eros, and creative hope. Capitalism and its interweavings with whiteness, cisheteronormativity and patriarchy tell us that we exist to be used. Politically engaged eros tells us that we exist to be and be loved, and that there is power in that love to break our chains.

The Beat of Our Own Drums

Drifting back to spirituality, another trend of the Beats that has been unconsciously and semi-consciously mirrored in my life is the trend of initiation and continuation of ancient religious tradition in a new idiom. Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg and others studied under religious leaders in the Buddhist tradition. Though their usage of Eastern religions leaves something to be desired at times, their study and practice was deeply examined and informed by their encounters with living holders of the traditions. In various ways, the Beats and their successors founded offshoot communities to practice Buddhism and other religions in a new American context (cf, for example, Naropa University’s collaborative work between Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and the Beats). While they often took these spiritualities in unconventional directions, such diversions were informed by a deep study and encounter with said spiritualities. Their work was also grounded in meditative practice, contemplation, and spiritual retreats with the intent of developing their own personal and communal orthopraxies. 

Once I returned to my Christian faith and began to pursue Eastern Orthodoxy, I followed a somewhat similar path. I read many of the Church Fathers and Mothers of the Orthodox Christian tradition, and read commentaries on their work. I participated in a variety of Orthodox liturgies and eventually underwent catechism in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America (GOARCH). For almost four years I did my best to faithfully participate, attend services, pray and grow in my Orthodox faith. My queerness and my calling to ministry eventually made this untenable, but rather than leave entirely I took a page from the Beats and was determined to help construct a new wineskin for the wine of Orthodox faith I had received. Thankfully, I had come into contact with my now-bishop, a woman who underwent even more intensive initiation into the Orthodox faith of her ancestors, an initiation which included time in a Russian monastery. Between her, myself, and my colleagues, we began to build up the Universalist Orthodox Church, a fully LGBTQ affirming Orthodox jurisdiction committed to bringing the best of Orthodox Christian spiritual acumen to bear on the needs of our time, serving Christ, praying and working together, loving our neighbors to the best of our ability and employing the wisdom of the saints across the ages to cut through the oppressions we see around us as faithfully as we can.

Conclusion

It’s hard to know where to conclude this reflection. There’s more I could say, and there’s more that is still unfolding. To sum up, I sincerely hope that this may be illuminating for folks who have deconstructed or are in the process of deconstructing or reconstructing. The Beats are a flawed but powerful example of how sexuality and spirituality can be liberated from oppressive norms in a way that does not necessitate the loss of either. Furthermore, I think the turn to subjectivity, thoughtful examination of our individual and collective past, can help people begin to de-absolutize the problematic beliefs we’ve been raised with (be they religious or social) and to tell new and better stories with our lives. We can learn to break down oppressive walls of bad doctrine and bad social ideology and build new temples of love, belonging and liberation. To paraphrase one of John Green’s videos, the only way out may be through, and the best way through is together, both with one another and with the wisdom of those who have come before. I’ll conclude with some lines from Diane di Prima:

“I Fail as a Dharma Teacher

[...]

Alas this life I can’t be kind and persuasive

[...]

But oh, my lamas, I want to

How I want to!

Just to see your old eyes shine in this Kaliyuga

Stars going out around us like birthday candles

Your Empty Clear Luminous and Unobstructed

Rainbow Bodies

Swimming in and through us all like transparent fish.”

Beautiful City – A Theological Ramble on “Godspell”– Pt. I: Jesus Musicals and Christology

 

So I had a lot of thoughts and F e e l i n g s about the 2011 revival of Tebelak and Schwartz’s musical Godspell and I wanted to share some of them here. This is gonna be a pretty disorganized piece (hence the title), but I hope that whether you’re a fan of the show or a reader of my work, you might find at least one thing that resonates or helps you understand why I feel the way I do about this show. To give my thoughts some structure, I’m turning this into a blog post series. This first piece will be divided into two sections: a longer section on theology and a shorter section on personal response.

1. Godspell vs JCS, and a Brief Diversion on Christologies

So one easy hot take is to compare and contrast Godspell with Jesus Christ Superstar, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that came out around the same time. Conservative Christians at the time were not too fond of either of them, but both found a strong audience among secular theater-goers and (presumably) progressive Christians. Tebelak, fwiw, was gay and a lifelong Episcopalian who had considered the priesthood at various points in his life. Webber is an agnostic who says he finds Jesus fascinating as an important historical figure. These facts aren’t meant to favor one writer over the other (although I will explain below why I personally prefer Godspell), but knowing these facts does do some to explain why these shows ended up the way they did while covering very similar subjects.

The general consensus I’ve heard and would agree with is that Superstar is about the interpersonal relationships of Jesus the man, and especially his relationship with Judas Iscariot. Godspell also brings the relationship between Judas and Jesus to the foreground, but Godspell (true to its name) is ultimately more about the gospel itself. About Jesus’ teachings, about the community of love that he created, and a little bit about Jesus the Son of God.

In this respect, I’d like to propose that these two musicals unintentionally illustrate two historic approaches to understanding the person and work of Christ. Jesus Christ Superstar loosely follows a theology of Christ which is aligned with the historic Antiochene school of Christology. 

A. Antioch

(St. John Chrysostom, famed Patriarch of Constantinople and student of the Antiochene School)

The Catechetical School of Antioch was a loose affiliation/institution of theologians who trained many of the prominent clergy in the Eastern churches. It emphasized the distinction between the divine and human natures of Christ. It was most invested in historical readings of Scripture. While the orthodox Antiochene scholars certainly confessed that Christ was both divine and human, they tended to state that the divinity of God the Son was not always accessible to Jesus in his humanity. Taken to the extreme, some Antiochenes embraced the heresies of Adoptionism* or Nestorianism**. The value of this school, however, was the investment in an accessible, anthropological reading of Scripture, and an understanding of Christ that emphasized the transcendence of the Son of God and the humanity of Jesus as one of us.

Jesus Christ Superstar approaches its subject matter with a mixture of both pathos and cynicism (intentional or otherwise). Taking place entirely during the Passion, none of the theophanic moments of Christ’s life are depicted (eg, the Baptism of Christ or the Transfiguration).*** We see only his humanity, and it is a very pitiable humanity. I say this not as a criticism, clearly the show succeeds at producing a great deal of sympathy and poignancy for its characters. The presence of the divine in the show is nearly absent. The Last Supper in both shows is not given its full doctrinal weight, but Superstar tones down the spiritual significance of it more than Godspell does. In Superstar, Jesus notices the indifference of his Apostles and says “For all you care, this could be my body that you’re eating, and my blood you’re drinking.”

Jesus and Judas both talk to God, and imply that God answers, but we are only shown one side of the conversation. When Judas commits suicide and is singing the titular number to Jesus on the cross, he does so as a disembodied spirit whom Jesus is not able to interact with. Rather than the traditional account of Jesus going down to Hades and preaching to the dead, here the dead preach to a human Jesus who is doing God’s will but may or may not be able to hear them. All in all, Webber (though obviously not himself an Antiochene by confession) is showing us a Jesus who is primarily a glorified human with a relationship to God, who is nonetheless not especially divine in his capacities, outlook or body. Where he is connected to divinity, there is a clear separation between his divinity and his humanity

B. Alexandria

(St. Cyril, famed Pope (Patriarch) and student of the Alexandrian School)

The Catechetical School of Alexandria was the other major center for Christian theological training in the early Eastern Church, located at Alexandria in Eastern Roman Egypt. It traced its lineage all the way back to St. Mark, but was most strongly influenced by the teachings of Pantaenus, Origen, St. Clement and St. Cyril (above). The Alexandrians were invested in allegorical readings of Scripture, and the use of “pagan” philosophy in the service of theology. They also emphasized the union of the divine and the human in Jesus Christ. Orthodox Alexandrians recognized that Jesus’ divinity and humanity were not consumed by each other, but they tended to suggest that Christ’s divinity and humanity were always operating simultaneously and synergistically, that it was impossible to tell exactly where one ends and the other begins. Taken to the opposite extreme of the Antiochenes, some Alexandrians embraced the heresies of Monophysitism (i) or Apollinarianism (ii). The value of this school was an investment in a polyvalent, mystical approach to Scripture, and an understanding of Christ that emphasized the saving power of God’s own divinity taking on our humanity in an immanent way. 

Godspell is more invested in the ethical impact of Jesus’ life and ministry. However, it is more willing to blur the lines between the divine and human world for the sake of its message and framing of Christ. We see the Baptism of Christ on stage, and although there is no explicit depiction of the Holy Spirit or the Father, the scene is preceded by John the Baptist’s messianic song, “Prepare Ye,” and is woven in and around the song “Save the People,” a song where Jesus proclaims the coming salvation that God the Father will work in their midst for the benefit of all. This happens while the new disciples are also being baptized and receive a flower signifying their membership in the community forming organically around Christ. Jesus’ presence is charged with the eschatological promise of God being in their midst, which is a more Alexandrian reading that blurs the line between where Jesus the human ends and Jesus the divine begins.

I argue that we also see in Godspell an allusion (perhaps unintentional) to the Transfiguration. There is a scene where the stage lights are off and the disciples hold wave glow sticks around Jesus in rhythmic patterns while Jesus talks about the light within. Even if this is not an intentional reference, the visual language of the scene lends itself to the light of God being present in the midst of the people.

Before the Last Supper, Jesus sings the ballad “Beautiful City,” encouraging the disciples to continue the beloved community after his death. While it is a secularized approach in some ways, there is again that blurring of humanity and divinity where the promised city is coming, is beautiful, marked by eschatological hope, and is still “not a city of angels, but a city of man.” During the Last Supper, Jesus prays the traditional Jewish blessing over the bread and wine, and then has lines which mirror the words of institution for the Eucharist. Whether one reads it as a memorial or a sacrament, Tebelak and Schwartz choose to frame the Last Supper as an intentional institution on Jesus’ part. The table is also bathed in light and smoke, implying divine energy or grace gathered around Jesus and his disciples.

On the cross, in Jesus Christ Superstar, Jesus’ last words emphasize his human obedience to the Father: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” In Godspell, the words are less literal to the Gospel text, but they lean towards a more divine-human reading of Jesus. He says, “Oh God, I’m dying,” and the disciples respond, “Oh God, You’re dying,” with the dual meaning of expressing despair and acknowledging his divinity. Jesus’ exclamation here is also very in line with Alexandrian theology, which emphasized the idea that if Christ is truly God incarnate, then a part of God did truly die on the cross, and not just a human who represented God or who was carried through his existence by God.

Finally, though both shows are ambiguous on the Resurrection in order to place their emotional cores front and center (iii), Godspell arguably has the more explicit allusion to the Resurrection. While Superstar ends with Jesus’ death on the cross and a final overture, Godspell ends with a stirring reprise of “Prepare Ye,” intermingled with “Long Live God,” again the messianic expectation. Jesus’ body is lovingly carried by the disciples offstage. In the production I saw, they carried him upwards into the house, where a bright white spotlight was shining. Though both the Antiochenes and the Alexandrians would naturally endorse faith in the Resurrection, in a secularized context, the Alexandrian-flavored Christology of Godspell is more comfortable with depicting Jesus’ divinity infusing and breaking into the human sphere of action. As such, Godspell is more comfortable than Superstar with at least alluding to the most awe-inspiring feat of Christ the God-man, his rising from the dead.

2. Conclusions and Pointing to Pt. II

In the end, the earnestness, exuberance and eschatological hopefulness of Godspell won me over, whereas after Jesus Christ Superstar I was impressed but not moved in the same way. The interplay between grounded radical ethics, unironic joy and tenderness, and the sprinklings of luminosity and divinity in Godspell spoke to me profoundly as a queer Orthodox Christian. Watching a filmed version of the stage show, I felt a visceral sense of connection to my faith and my God, one that echoed various points along my spiritual journey where my heart “burned within me” like the disciples on the Emmaus road. Where I was surrounded by friends who were seeking Christ, and the presence of God was an animating energy of love, hope and joy in our midst. In the next part, I want to pick up the Alexandrian lens to begin to talk about what moved me about this musical in particular, drawing on my specific experiences as a queer Christian, as an Eastern Orthodox Christian, and as someone who inhabits both of those identities simultaneously.

*Adoptionism is the belief that Jesus was entirely human at his birth and that the divinity of the Son of God came and inhabited him at his baptism or later.

**Nestorianism is the belief that Jesus had a human nature and a divine nature, but that the two were entirely separate from one another, with the divine nature operating the human Jesus without experiencing any of the human things Jesus experienced directly.

***The Transfiguration is not explicitly named as such in Godspell. However, I will argue later that it does make an appearance.

(i) Monophysitism is the belief that Jesus had one nature which was an indistinct mixture of humanity and divinity. This belief is not to be confused with its orthodox Alexandrian counterpart, Miaphysitism, which is the belief that Jesus has one nature where the humanity and the divinity are united but do not dissolve into each other. The latter doctrine is the belief of the Oriental Orthodox Churches.

(ii) Apollinarianism is the belief that Jesus had a human body but a divine soul/mind.

(iii) Jesus Christ Superstar’s emotional core being the pathos of the character relationships, Godspell’s emotional core being the poignancy and ethos of the gospel and the community of disciples.

Passion Diptych -- Sts Thomas and Matthew Shepard (Poem)

 

I.

Mysteries catch us by surprise.

You live fully, freely

Calling out the world by being

In it.

Looking back, it’s easy

To see what Heaven was like,

Who it was who called you

In each moment walking on the Earth

To make of it a little bit the garden

By planting flower, pulling weeds,

And standing at the gates of gospel,

Saying,

“Look! I am free.

And how about you?”

II.

Sailing off to distant lands,

To Laramie or Chennai,

Carrying his love in that firm,

Quiet, faithful way,

And his voice was the wind within your sails.

Rome and Rabat took their prices,

Tearing flesh as only empire can,

My dear beloveds, even so you held

Your course to where He promised harbor,

For your hearts, for His words in you, saying,

“Come! come alive

And be made new.”

III.

He never asked for this

For you.

Your body pierced and torn,

And always the cry of the crowd

Pretending your light wasn’t so bright as to tear the whole damn world open,

The whole thing exposing its bones to light

And maybe love.

And yet in this the midnight of your stories,

He knew, oh so well how each spear, nail, pistol felt,

And how the crowds would twist your words, demanding your blood over the truth, that there is no truth where there is no love and so they said in mockery,

“Unless I see him broken,

I won’t believe.”

IV.

And now you’ve walked across the long and windswept plains,

Winding, weary but warm and full of everlasting,

Up to Zion.

Somewhere, He gently brushes hands across each wound,

Caresses, and you feel your own hands holding his, wounds as one.

He says, touch so deep and tender,

“You’re not a ghost, nor am I.”

And you respond, breathing in his life,

“My Lord and my God.”

Exodus Talks: Come, Receive the Light

 

Note: This reflection is the fourth in a four part series of reflections I’m writing for my final in an exegesis and preaching course in seminary. As such, these reflections may have more of the cadence of a homily than my usual material does. The text we used for study was Exodus. This fourth and final reflection is based on Exodus 24:1-18.

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God,

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil,

It gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil

[…]

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things

[…]

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

world broods with warm breast and ah! Bright wings.”*

In this poem, Victorian Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins gives praise for the splendor of God’s glory. The glory of God takes many forms. Saints from all ages have been blessed to see the Uncreated Light of God’s presence. To see it flame out, to feel it refreshing and restoring, to see the flash of the Spirit’s brightness in motion. But what can this glory tell us about the character of God, and about what God might be calling us as followers of Christ to do? In today’s texts, we are treated to revelations of God’s glory, revelations that paint a beautiful picture of what it means to seek God’s Kingdom. 

On Pascha, we chant that triumphant hymn, “Come, receive the light that is never overtaken by night, and glorify Christ!”** In so doing, we recognize not just the Resurrection, but that the history of God’s people has been a history of God leading us into God’s never-waning light. We see this in today’s text especially. The Israelites have emerged from the wilderness, through their trial with Amalek, and have come to Mt. Sinai. They have heard the new life that God is calling them to live. A life marked by a covenant of closeness with God. The people ratify the covenant by a liturgical act of sacrifice. Moses and the priests sacrifice livestock, sprinkle the blood of the livestock on the people, and share the food with the community. In the life of Israel, the blood of an animal symbolized the force of life itself. The sprinkling of blood suggests that those who follow God and walk in God’s ways will be blessed with the new life. God invites all of God’s people into new community and new closeness with God. God begins a covenant here with Israel which will in time be expanded to include all the nations. The covenant is founded on justice, love and liberation, and the inseparable praxis of the two.  Closeness with God looks like hospitality, welcome, justice and liberation, as evidenced by the elders’ audience with God in the “throne room,” an encounter which is marked symbolically and literally by these virtues.

Moses and the elders are invited to see the light of God’s presence. They are invited to see a vision of what their new life with God will look like. Sitting on the mountain, in the throne room of God’s presence, they see a “sapphire pavement,” as dazzling blue as the sky itself. Ancient interpreters both Jewish and Christian suggest that this blue pavement is a symbol of God transforming hard circumstances into life and freedom by God’s grace and power. St Ephrem the Syrian, and the Aramaic Targum tradition both suggest that the sapphire color was a reminder of the sea that God had parted for the Israelites to cross on dry land. The bricks were a reminder of the bricks they were forced to make in their slavery in Egypt. What were once obstacles to freedom are now symbols of its presence in their midst.

And before the throne of God, in the midst of this wondrous light, they eat a meal with the Creator. God invites Israel to eat together, in an act of sacred hospitality. They cannot see God’s face, but they are ushered into God’s presence. The light of God’s glory is mysterious. But it is also warm and inviting.

If we examine this moment of divine-human fellowship, we may remember the hospitality of Abraham in Genesis. In Andrei Rublev’s brilliant icon of this scene, the artist depicts the three angels as a theophany, a manifestation of the Holy Trinity. As with many icons, this one is meant to be looked through, to be participated in when we see it and are reminded of the truths about God’s character that the artist wishes to make clear to us. In this icon, Rublev reminds us of the truth of God’s hospitality. The Trinity are seated around a table with an empty seat. They gesture to one another, indicating God the Father sending Christ and the Holy Spirit. The staging of the scene invites us to be the fourth person at the banquet. This icon reminds us of our ultimate goal. We are to be deified, to participate in the life of the Trinity. God is inviting us into God’s light. The light of God is sacred hospitality, community, and communion.

In the Gospel According to St. Matthew, we see Jesus continuing to invite us into the light. In an echo to the ratifying of the Hebrew covenant, Jesus shares a meal with his apostles. The apostles share bread and wine with God in the flesh. And just as blood was poured out to establish God’s covenant with a particular nation, so now a second covenant is established by the pouring of Christ’s blood. One which is “poured out for many, for the forgiveness of sins.” The blood brings life. It would be easy to simply say that Christ’s death on the cross sanctified death, brought the forgiveness of sins, and stop there. These are all true, but just as the sacrifice in the Israelite covenant  returned as sustenance and new life for the community, Christ rose from the dead and returned to be with us as the resurrection and the life of all. God invites all of us, in our particularities, into a life characterized by freedom, hospitality, liberation, justice, and love. We are called to practice these virtues as the way of discipleship. But ultimately it is God’s light within us and within each other, God’s grace shed as energy in the world, that enables us to be made whole and made fully alive in God.

This text teaches us to hope for liberation for ourselves and one another, and to hope for the positive transformation of our communities through God’s justice being made known in our midst. Though Christians do not follow the mitzvot word for word, we can be encouraged that in the giving of the Torah, we see also God making Godself present to God’s children, a presence that brings wholeness. Jesus himself said that he did not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. To bring to us as Gentiles a way to covenant and relationship with God. St James the Brother of our Lord teaches about the royal law of liberty. From the Old Testament to the New, though the specific practices of faithfulness may differ from community to community, God is always inviting us into freedom. Inviting us into God’s light.

The saints across time recognized this light. St. Dionysus the Areopagite wrote about the hiddenness of God. In an experience similar to the theophany at Sinai, St. Dionysus encourages the follower of Christ to “make our way straight to the topmost peak, beyond knowing and light, of the mystical scriptures—there where the simple, absolute and unchangeable, mysteries of God’s speaking lie wrapped in the darkness beyond light of secret—hidden silence.”*** Several centuries later, St. Gregory Palamas wrote with joy about the Uncreated Light that we can experience in intimate prayer and a life of holiness with God. And so we see God’s invitation echoed throughout the ages. Work for justice. Work for the flourishing and freedom of your neighbors. Invite one another to the banquet table. And perhaps most importantly, come to the table yourself and sit down to be renewed by the welcoming light of Christ.

*Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur. Accessed October 21st, 2020.

**Public domain hymn, cf. “Great and Holy Pascha,” https://www.goarch.org/pascha . Accessed November 23rd, 2020.

***”Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-dionysius-areopagite/#SouIdeChaWriTerChrNeo. Accessed November 23rd, 2020

Exodus Talks: The Amalekite Within

 Note: This reflection is the third in a four part series of reflections I’m writing for my final in an exegesis and preaching course in seminary. As such, these reflections may have more of the cadence of a homily than my usual material does. The text we used for study was Exodus. This third reflection is based on Exodus 17:8-16.

In this text, we encounter an Israel under attack from a foreign enemy. They have been liberated from Egyptian oppression, and they are wandering through the wilderness. God is slowly guiding them to Canaan, the Promised Land. As they draw nearer to Mt. Sinai, they are attacked by the Amalekites. This is, on a surface reading, a text of war. Much has been made, and rightly so, of the moral and spiritual dilemma of what it means when God’s people go to war. This pattern of violence in many ways only grows more prominent when the Israelites begin their entry into Canaan. We are indebted to faithful people throughout the centuries who have interrogated these “texts of terror,” to consider why they are in Scripture, what they say, and perhaps more importantly what they do not say. For us as Orthodox Christians, the written Biblical canon is a witness to the Living Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, and it is through his presence as the Incarnate Word in the power of the Holy Spirit that we interpret the written word. We are not bound to affirm or accept the literal meaning of every word in the Bible as edifying, but we are called to wrestle with other meanings that the Spirit brings to us when we gather as the Body of Christ. With this encouragement in mind, let us accept God’s invitation through the Holy Prophet Isaiah, “’Come, let us reason together,’ says the LORD.” Let us reason and wrestle together, and see what we may discover.

The Church Fathers and Mothers used many methods to receive the Word of God from the Scriptures. Two of these methods are allegory and typology. Taking these together, perhaps we can discern something valuable for our time in this text. Typology asks the question, “Where is Jesus pointed to in this text?” One clear example is the way Moses stands to resist the Amalekites through prayer for God’s people. He stands on a mountain, a high hill. He raises his arms to Heaven. Almost in the shape of a cross. In this same way, Christ raised his arms to Heaven in his life-giving passion, interceding with his prayer and his own life-blood that his people, all of God’s children, would be given the strength to overcome the spiritual and systemic forces of death and evil that reigned in their midst. In reading Scripture typologically, we must be careful not to minimize the spiritual value of the original action, even as we acknowledge that it points for us, as does the whole canon, to the person and work of Christ. Prior to God becoming incarnate, Moses prayed faithfully on behalf of God’s people, and led them to be unified as a people. The witness of Moses still echoes forward today, not only in our community but also in the community of our Jewish siblings under God.

Another method used by the Church Fathers and Mothers is allegory. This method can be seen in many of our hymns. Consider the Katavasia of Christmas. “The furnace moist with dew was the image and figure of a wonder past nature.  For it burnt not the Children whom it had received, even as the fire of the Godhead consumed not the Virgin’s womb into which it had descended.” This is also in some ways a typology, an event in the Old Testament which can be seen to point to Christ. All typologies are allegories, but allegory encompasses more than just the presence of Christ indicated in Scripture. Here, we see the womb of the Mother of God as she carried Christ being compared to the three holy youths in the Book of Daniel who were not burned by the fiery furnace. Here, the furnace is compared to the fire of Christ’s full divinity, which shone forth even in his humanity but did not consume the Theotokos. We see that this tells us something about the mercy and humility of Christ, and the faithfulness of the Virgin to God’s request, something we could not see were we to only read the Book of Daniel literally.

In Exodus, we see another example of allegory. The people of God are being attacked by an enemy force. Moses does send warriors to fight in self-defense. Another text in Deuteronomy suggests that the Amalekite assault happened at a time when Israel was vulnerable and weary from traveling. However, Moses does not trust primarily in Israelite military might. Instead, he goes up on the mountain and prays in a very embodied and fervent way, trusting that the true spiritual source of victory is not human vigor, but the power and deliverance of God.

If we are to understand this text for our own times, we should look closely at the posture of Moses in this event. Allegory with texts such as these can easily be misapplied, making the Amalekites to be whoever it is convenient for us to hate. We should never apply this kind of thinking to another people group, to other human beings whom God loves. The spiritual nature of Moses’ solution suggests that a spiritual interpretation is necessary. That is to say, we should be concerned not so much with enemies around us, but spiritual and systemic enemies. We must conquer the Amalekite within. 

This text, read in a spiritual allegory, suggests that conflict in our lives is not to be overcome by human force, power, or violence, but by standing firm in our integrity and trusting God to bring about a good outcome. It also suggests that in any conflict involving interpersonal relationships, we are to avoid essentializing any human enemy or group of enemies as the problem, but to try and see the injustice or evil itself as the thing to be resisted in creative ways. While we may find ourselves entrenched in conflict with our neighbor, sometimes with vast power differentials, we must find ways to resist the harm they cause without seeking their destruction. We must root out the sources of evil. Broken systems that take the life of the oppressed and the humanity of the oppressor. Human greed, desire for power, fear of scarcity, and an inability to see the image of God in one another, to see Christ in one another. Amalek is all around us. And we are all God’s beloved children. For all of us to truly live as equals in dignity, honor, life and love under God, we must defeat the spirit of Amalek that lives on in our societies and in our hearts.

In St. Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus shows a way to do this. The Temple was full of people who truly wanted to love, serve and worship God. But greed and the status quo of a few powerful people had blocked access to the life giving rites that all of God’s people wanted to participate in. Jesus could have led an army of his followers into the Temple and destroyed those people who were charging unjust rates for sacrifices. On the other hand, he could have also simply gone along with it, maybe preach a sermon encouraging the moneychangers to lower their rates. But Christ did neither of these things. Instead, he organized an act of creative resistance, one which destroyed the status quo without destroying the human beings who capitulated to it. He drove out the moneychangers, proclaiming and reiterating the forgotten truth, that the Temple was to be “a house of prayer for all people,” regardless of wealth, class, origin, or status. Jesus resisted evil without seeking the death of those caught up in its power.

We are not Christ. And not every situation has a clear path to this holy mode of resistance. We will try. Sometimes we will succeed, and sometimes we will fail. Sometimes we will emerge triumphant over the spiritual forces that keep us in bondage, and sometimes we will only cause harm to one another. In all cases, however, we are called to trust that God will give resolution and victory to those who resist in faithful ways.  We are to hope for an end to evil itself, and ways of being that are contrary to the flourishing of God’s children and to hope that God will provide ways of renewal which involve human engagement but do not require its success in order to work. We are to enact creative and prayerful resistance against evil to focus our energies on supporting one another in resistance to evil rather than against the persons of those we see as our enemies. May we be led by the example and witness of Moses, the example and witness of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by his grace and power may we conquer the Amalekite within.

*In general, Orthodox hymns and their arrangements are not copyrighted and are usually public domain because they’re so old, but cf. for a source Ode 8 of the Katavasia of Nativity, http://www.saintjonah.org/services/nativity.htm

Exodus Talks: 2020 Hindsight

 Note: This reflection is the second in a four part series of reflections I’m writing for my final in an exegesis and preaching course in seminary. As such, these reflections may have more of the cadence of a homily than my usual material does. The text we used for study was Exodus. This second reflection is based on Exodus 6:1-13.

In this text, we see Moses wrestling with what it means to be called by God. Again. This is the second call narrative we see for Moses in the Book of Exodus. Some scholars suggest that this is two separate accounts of Moses’ call stitched together. While this is certainly a possibility, I can also see a profound spiritual value to reading this text as a re-calling of Moses to his work. It comes on the heels of what feels like his first failure. Moses has gone to Pharaoh, preached all that God ordered him to preach, and the oppression of the Israelites has only increased. I can imagine Moses feeling discouraged here, almost as if he has made his people worse off than before. In the midst of this discouragement, in the darkness deepening around Israel before the dawn, God calls Moses again.

We often use the phrase, “hindsight is 20/20.” That we don’t always know the best course of action when a choice is in front of us. When we look back, with our new knowledge in the present, we see more clearly what we could have done, and maybe what we should have done. God’s call of encouragement to Moses draws on this same insight. Instead of the sigh of regret that “hindsight is 20/20,” however, God uses this idea to remind Moses of the good that God has done for them, and the good that God is still beginning to do. God encourages Moses to remember God’s saving work for his ancestors: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God reminds Moses that those ancestors didn’t know God by God’s truest and deepest name, like Moses now does. God reminds Moses that God made a promise to the Patriarchs that they would be given a land for their descendants to prosper and flourish in. Moses can look back and see with 20/20 hindsight that God was faithful to the Patriarchs in cultivating a covenant and a friendship with them. And now Moses and God’s people in the present have a relationship with God that is even closer. God encourages Moses to trust that this same pattern will continue into the future. “You will know I am your God, because I will free you from the Egyptian yoke, and I will bring you to the land I promised to your ancestors.”

In the St. Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus gives us a similar promise, one that also serves as a warning against impatience. Jesus is preaching about the Kingdom of God. Christ tells his apostles, “If someone comes to you saying, ‘Look, there’s the Messiah! In the wilderness!’ Or ‘Look, here’s the Messiah! in the inner rooms.’ Don’t believe them. When I come again, it will be like lightning, striking the sky from East to West. You won’t be able to miss it. Hindsight is 20/20.” In God’s words to the apostles and to Moses, God teaches us how to hope.  We live in a world where authorities make promises that they can’t or won’t fulfill, where power and expediency are seen by many as the primary tools for accomplishing one’s desires. We are called to work for the Kingdom of God, certainly. We can’t be passive, and we can’t turn a blind eye to one another’s suffering. But we are also called to trust in the process of God’s grace working in synergy with us.  God shows up in our long laboring for each other’s liberation. We can expect the road to liberation, the road to salvation to be slow.  Ultimately, though, it is infinitely more life-giving and steadfast in the long run to partner with God, to work in faithfulness and love and hope, than to put our hopes on one mortal power to save us. And God reminds us that in the end, we will see the hope we yearn for. “You will know that I am your God, because I will free you. Because I will bring you to the place I promised.”

Let me share a few insights from Fr. Matthew the Poor, a wise elder of the Coptic Church. Fr. Matthew says that “we do not need to resort to fervent pleas and tears and emotional supplications that the Lord may come to us, for He is always present and is knocking even now. He will not stop, because He wants to enter our lives. He finds His own rest with us, and His greatest joy is to share with us our cross and our dark night, for He still loves the cross. […] The alert and simple soul notices the touch of His hand writing the story of its salvation through the years and the succession of events.”* Hindsight, beloved in Christ, is 20/20.

God calls Moses. God calls the apostles. And God calls us. God calls us to see where God has shown up into our lives. To see that as both a fruit and a future sign of the new and wonderful things God is looking to do in our midst, that God will do in our midst.  God is working to “bring good news to the poor, to liberate the captives, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” God promises to work both through our concrete actions and in ways beyond our reach. Freedom’s presence in our lives as we look back on each step of the journey is a witness to God’s righteous power, mercy and love. And at each step of the journey, our loving Lord walks with us. Carrying our burdens, helping us to carry one another’s burdens, revealing to us deeper and deeper depths of God’s name. The Great I Am. The one whose mercy endures forever. Alleluia. Amen.

*Fr. Matthew the Poor, The Communion of Love (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), 34-5.

Exodus Talks: Mother Tzipporah, Priest of the Lord

 

Note: This reflection is the first in a four part series of reflections I’m writing for my final in an exegesis and preaching course in seminary. As such, these reflections may have more of the cadence of a homily than my usual material does. The text we used for study was Exodus. This first reflection is based on Exodus 4:18-26. 

In this passage, we see a courageous display of faithfulness. Tzipporah acts with boldness to preserve the life of her family. As she does this, she also shows us what it means for us as human beings to be the high priests of creation. Tzipporah is the daughter of the High Priest of Midian. Jethro and his people have kept the faith alive in the wilderness. Moses’ time in Midian has helped him remember what it means to be a servant of God. As they begin the journey back to Egypt, however, it is Tzipporah who will show Moses an act of faithfulness to God. Tzipporah, like her father, becomes a priest of the Most High God. She is Mother Tzipporah.

As they are spending the night on the road to Egypt, the text says that God tries to kill either Moses or his son. This is a challenging account, and it may be disturbing to many. I am going to offer an interpretation, but before I do so, I take this space as an opportunity to acknowledge that not everything in Scripture can be easily explained, and we are right in using our God-given conscience to wrestle, reject easy answers, and come to our own conclusions. Nothing I write here is meant to be an end-all be-all. Only my best effort to receive from this text whatever I can.

The text notes that God “tries” to kill Moses. What this says to me is that God is testing Moses and Tzipporah. God wants to know if they will act boldly and courageously on behalf of those in danger. Given Moses’ reluctance to answer God’s call, and the danger of the situation they are entering into, this makes some sense. Tzipporah circumcises her son, a ritual and liturgical action that reminds God of God’s covenant with Abraham. When the Israelite priests made a sacrifice to God, they knew that the sacrifice would not be consumed utterly, but returned to the community as life and sustenance. When Christ came to be both High Priest and sacrifice, he was not destroyed, but returned to life and brought eternal life to all of God’s children. When our priests offer bread and wine on the altar, these are not taken away by God but transfigured, sanctified and transformed into the Body and Blood of our Lord. They are then returned to the community as a source of life, “for faith unashamed, for love unfeigned,” and for all the other gifts God gives us through Christ in the Eucharist.

Here, we see Mother Tzipporah acting in the same role as God’s other priests across time. She trusts that in offering her son, God will not destroy any of them, but will return her faithful gesture to her in gifts of protection, life and liberation.

God’s desire is to bring that fullness of life to all people. For those who suffer under oppression, God’s restoration looks like support. Uplifting. Empowerment. For those who oppress, God’s restoration begins with humbling. Casting down. We are reminded of the Mother of God and her song, “He has put down the mighty from their thrones and has exalted the humble.” Before they set out to Egypt, God promises to restore justice between God’s firstborn son Israel, and God’s other son, Egypt. God warns Pharaoh that if Pharaoh does not respect the dignity and humanity of God’s firstborn, God will smite the firstborn of Egypt.

This may seem retributive, but it becomes more clear if we see it in the light of restorative justice and God’s desire to bring new life. God’s people are fragmented and under oppression in Egypt. Their suffering is an active situation, and they have not yet been fully united to pursue justice. Even so, there have been men and women doing courageous acts of faithfulness under oppression. Consider Mother Tzipporah, or the midwives Shiphrah and Puah. Yet it also seems clear that in order for God to enact God’s restorative justice on the Israelites and the Egyptians, something must be done to break the grip of Egyptian oppression and their fear of losing their power. This something must also bring the Israelites together as a unified people, who can act communally and in time reach out to other communities and be a blessing to the nations. God gives an opportunity through Moses’ warning for Egypt to partner with God in restorative justice, to let the Hebrews go. God will not use force unless it is clear that healing cannot begin within the status quo.

In the Gospel of St. John, we see Jesus commissioning St. Peter to be an agent of God’s justice and renewal, as an apostle and as a priest. On the seashore, after the Resurrection, Jesus asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?” And each time when Peter seeks to prove his love, Jesus tells him to act in deeds of faithful justice. Feed my sheep, tend my flock. Take care of my lambs. Here the method by which God lifts up the lowly and brings down the powerful is a different method. Christ responds to a different situation.  God’s people are under oppression from the Romans. Yet at the same time they have formed a strong consciousness of unity as a people. They have survived the Exodus and the exile. God’s restorative justice now is once again to make the enemies of God’s people into God’s friends. Jesus models this in his own life and ministry, particularly here in this encounter with Peter. Here we encounter not a stubborn Pharaoh, but a repentant apostle, one who has abandoned God but wishes to turn and receive life again. In God’s restorative justice, Jesus tells Peter that the measure of Peter’s love will be shown in how he brings together God’s flock, a flock that is already expanding to include both Jew and Gentile. This is a slower revolution, one from the inside out of Roman society. Force has been tried against the Romans and has failed to produce the desired change. The needed change is more complex and entangled, and so Christ commissions his apostles to knit together disparate peoples, to make enemies into friends, and to bring life to spaces of social and spiritual death.

St Maximus the Confessor tells us that the saints are called to “unite paradise and the inhabited world to make one earth, gathered together.”* Only some may be called to serve in the altar, but we are all of us priests of God by virtue of our baptism. And so I wonder…what separate communities are we each called to bring back together? What deeds of transformative justice can we commit or take part in? How can we bring the needs of our community to God, and act with works of faithfulness for the flourishing of all those we are in relationship with? What social inequities need to shift so that we can bring oppressed and oppressor to a level playing field? And what, maybe is one thing that each of us can do to begin to chip away at the injustices that plague our communities?

We must realize that we can be whole together in ways we cannot be whole on our own. But it requires faithful action, it requires that we offer our labor and our prayer to God not just on our own behalf, but on behalf of our neighbor. It also requires, for those of us complicit in oppression that we offer our repentance in word and in deed. As we offer all these things, in the world and on the altar, we can be encouraged by the examples of Mother Tzipporah, of St. Peter, of the Theotokos, and of all other faithful saints throughout history who chose to stand firm in the midst of death, and offer their lives to God that their people might receive life.

*in “Ecological Readings of St. Maximus the Confessor,” https://journals.wheaton.edu/index.php/wheaton_writing/article/download/580/137/