Monthly Archives: March 2013

Dead Can Dance: A Meditation and Playlist for Holy Saturday

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The Dance of Death (1493) by Michael Wolgemut, from the Liber chronicarum by Hartmann Schedel

“[Jesus] was dead, to begin with. There was no doubt about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner…. [Jesus] was as dead as a door-nail…. There is no doubt that [Jesus] was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.” adapted from Dickens’ _A Christmas Carol_

Christians are sorely tempted to gloss over or spiritualize the death of Christ. After all, how dead can we imagine the Source of all life? At what point do our imaginations fail to allow for his return to life? If we find Jesus’ resurrection easy to believe, might it be at the expense of our belief in Jesus’ death? Our scriptures and our creeds stress that Jesus did not just die, he was buried. He was counted and fully identified with the dead. He took kenosis, humanity, and mortality to their furthest limits and poured himself out even to death. Christ’s earliest followers wanted to impress upon all who would listen that he did not faint, lose consciousness, or swoon. He was not “mostly dead.” He was as dead as dead gets, deader than we’ll ever be, as ultimate in death as in life, not only the firstborn of all creation, but also the jigging and grinning leader and Lord of the danse macabre that ultimately unites us all regardless of who we were and what we believed. Wherever we go when we die, he went there, and conquered it in his own name. Harrowing of Hell - from a 15th century French Book of Hours at the Huntington Library

Death couldn’t hold him any more than heaven or earth could. Holy Saturday makes room in our theology for the death of God, and a God beyond Being, and all the contributions of William Blake and John of the Cross, Hegel and Nietchze, Caputo and Zizek. We are given a time to mourn him and celebrate his life, time for a proper wake, granted an interval to contemplate the horror of life without him, an opportunity to come together and make sense of and respond to what he was on about in life.

It’s a time to allow our perspectives to shift, like Robert DeLong sings about in “Global Concepts.”

After I die, I’ll re-awake,
redefine what was at stake
from the hindsight of a god.

Whether or not you believe Jesus completely grasped the entirety of who he was and what he came to do before he died, it’s quite obvious that his disciples did not. Only in losing him and in his return did they begin to understand the magnitude of what was at stake. Even those who believed he was the Messiah had a limited notion of what that meant before Christ’s death and resurrection. To John’s disciples who wondered if he was the One, he replied “that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the gospel preached to them” (Luke 7:22), and to the crowds he wondered aloud, if John’s preaching and my healing can’t do it, what’s it going to take to get you people mourning and dancing? What did you go out into the desert to see? A reed in the wind? A man in soft clothes? A prophet? What will you make of me coming to eat and drink with you?

Did I make money? Was I proud?
Did I play my songs too loud?
Did I leave my life to chance
or did I make you f***ing dance?

Holy Saturday redefines death, life, and power. The dance of the dead is not a sign of futility or defeat, but of completion, hope in more than this life, and victory.

Should I close my eyes and prophesize
Hoping maybe someday come?
Should I wet the ground with my own tears
Crying over what’s been done?

Should I lift the dirt and plant the seed
Even though I’ve never grown?
Should I wet the ground with the sweat from my brow
And believe in my good work?

Hey there, I’m flying up above
Looking down on the tired earth
I can see, I can see potential
Speaking through you, speaking to you
From all of heaven’s possibility

Power, hey, do know how it work?
Hey, do you know that the meek
They shall inherit the earth?
You should work, you should work
Yeah, for the self and the family

Should I hit the water or stay on dry land
Even though I’ve never swam?
Take machete, take them into the brush
Though at first there is no path

Taste the war paint on my tongue
As it’s dripping with my sweat
Place my gaze in the future’s path
Seeing things that ain’t come yet

Hope to watch the victory dance
After the day’s work is done
Hope to watch the victory dance
In the evening’s setting sun

Need more for your playlist? Try Elbow’s “The Night Will Always Win” (imagine Peter and Judas singing that for their various reasons), Dave Matthews’ “The Space Between” and The Waterboys’ “Song for the Life” along with, of course the Dead Can Dance’s eponymous album from way back when for atmosphere. Interestingly enough they put out an album called Anastasis (=resurrection) last year that I’ll be listening to tomorrow.

I’ll close with a poem that leads a great post on the subject of Holy Saturday by Christine Valters Paintner

Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly.
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you as few human
Or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice so tender,
My need of God
Absolutely clear.

~ Hafiz

First World Fasting

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Or, Can I Keep My Fast with a Dilettante Grasshopper Martini?

I have been fasting on Wednesdays during Lent – my own mongrel, modified fast designed entirely to suit my own purposes. Admittedly, many of those purposes are spiritual, but it still feels more like self-care than self-denial. I just wasn’t feeling the denial this year. My flesh frankly hasn’t done much that would respond to punishment lately. I needed an especially affirming fast this year – to grow in gratitude for and proper relation to the good things in my life.

“Asceticism has a basic role in any spirituality, but ascetic practices, in my opinion, can be healthy or unhealthy. Suppose for example, I am considering fasting from food or from television. I use two criteria for deciding on the wholesomeness of my fast. First, does the discipline of saying no still affirm the goodness of creation? Is my motivation to gain more freedom for better service, to give up something good for something better? Second, am I expressing God’s love for me or seeking to achieve it? Is my human effort replacing the grace of God? Is this an effort made in order to earn the love of God? Or is this discipline a response to God’s forgiving grace in Christ? Does the practice lead to the freedom of the athlete who runs in the knowledge of God’s love or to the bondage of a desperate attempt to earn what cannot be earned?”

– Bradley P. Holt, Thirsty for God p. 55-56

As with many Protestant Christians of a certain age, my first forays into fasting were guided by Richard Foster’s A Celebration of Discipline which lauds fasting as, among other things, a tool of self-knowledge

“Fasting reveals the things that control us. We tend to cover up what is inside us with food and other good things, but in fasting these things surface…. At first we will rationalize that our anger, for example, is due to our hunger. We will then discover that we are angry not because of hunger, but because the spirit of anger is within us. We can rejoice in this knowledge because we know that healing is available through the power of Christ…. Fasting helps us keep our balance in life. How easily we begin to allow nonessentials to take precedence in our lives. How quickly we crave things we do not need until we are enslaved by them….”

This year I already felt keenly aware of the things controlling me. I was looking for a way to work my way free of them – not just for a season, but sustainably. My first fasts seem to have primed me toward greater gentleness with my self and others when I fast. I lower my expectations, or rather: I expect the weakness that is within all of us, and the temptation to lash out at it diminishes. Nowadays fasting seems to mellow me, so I’m experimenting with forms I can work reasonably into ordinary time. I’m a short-burst person seeking moderation and consistency – in my appetites and compulsions, in my attitudes and energy and focus. That artistic-Irish temperament serves my productivity, but not my long-haul relationships, of which I now have several and desire more. I’ve intentionally crafted this year’s fast to center on experiencing generosity, provision, and celebration rather than deprivation.

“When you fast, see the fasting of others. If you want God to know that you are hungry, know that another is hungry…. If you ask for yourself what you deny to others, your asking is a mockery…. Let us use fasting to make up for what we have lost by despising others. Let us offer our souls in sacrifice by means of fasting…. When you fast, if your mercy is thin your harvest will be thin; when you fast, what you pour out in mercy overflows into your barn. Therefore, do not lose by saving, but gather in by scattering. Give to the poor, and you give to yourself. You will not be allowed to keep what you have refused to give to others.”

– St. Peter Chrysologus, Sermon 43: PL 52, 320, 322

On this year’s fast I am hungry, but I’m not going hungry. I am not eating one day a week, but I’m not giving up protein or caffeine or vitamins or anything that leads to true debilitation or day-long headaches. It’s a series of small steps away from being an overfed, overstuffed, overinsulated Christian toward being a well-fed, nourished and grateful Christian, willing to give what I’ve been given and to feel the relatively small indignities and hurts of my first-world problems. If I can’t occasionally suffer through my own loneliness and stress without numbing the pain with an obscene number of mint fudge creme Oreos, what empathy can I offer another? Do I want to watch the news a la Marie Antoinette, thinking, “These people obviously need to eat more chocolate?” Or can I sympathize with others who are not making the best decisions because they are hungry or run down or off-balance as I myself get to be so, so easily?

It’s been a small, practical fast, and I’m learning small, practical lessons. My fast is not total enough to really be detoxifying, but it’s gotten me thinking about the connections between thinking and digesting, taking things in, and working things out, chewing and ruminating. I’m recognizing that I have resources and reserves that are meant to be called on, drawn on, and expended regularly. It is good to occasionally test their limits. It’s enough of a fast that I rely more on God, acknowledging what I’ve been given and practicing trust and patience where I lack. Fasting is a natural companion to other disciplines: fasting and silence, fasting and service, fasting and study. The fasts will take on distinct flavors, and they’re strangely filling. And even though I have been thinking of this as the year of the fast I have chosen, to the degree it has corresponded to the fast God has chosen, I have felt God’s promises of help and guidance made good….

“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter— when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousnesswill go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I. If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk,10 and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry  and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday. The Lord will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail. Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the age-old foundations; you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls, Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.

– Isaiah 58:6-12

Is there anything else to desire, really? It’s about finding satisfaction with what is truly satisfying, and not selling out my birthright or justice for my brothers and sisters by settling for a package of Oreos.

Pantoums

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Despising the Pain: A Pantoum by Jenn Cavanaugh

 

I face death every day

For the joy that is set before me.

Dust returns. Death loses the fray –

The happy end begins the story.

 

For the joy that is set before me

I ride the eternal like a tide.

The happy end begins the story –

We’ll wear our spirits on the outside.

 

I ride the eternal like a tide,

Dizzied and spun, despising the pain.

We’ll wear our spirits on the outside

For the work that is not in vain.

 

Dizzied and spun, despising the pain,

Dust returns. Death loses the fray.

For the work that is not in vain

I face death every day.

Poor blog, doomed respository for my second-tier poems. I post this one as an example to accompany yesterday’s Writers Workshop post on the pantoum form, so you can see what you can get out of working in the form in short order. It’s only the third or fourth one I’ve ever written, and the results still feel blocky, compared to writing in unrhymed free verse. If you get something out of the theme or a phrase, I’m glad. Otherwise, this is what a writing exercise looks like!

So far, the best part of writing pantoums is that they practically write themselves – you put a couple of lines together, give them a flick, and you have a perpetual motion poetry machine. For me, they are line-generators. You put a line in, you get a line out, because the form is going to take you there. To write one that stands up as fine poetry, like the one I’ll leave you with here, I will probably have to give up the rhyme, as she did, make my lines more grammatically creative, and incorporate more narrative detail. A pantoum doesn’t have to tell a story, but the ones that appeal to me most suggest one. Do you have a favorite or one of your own to share?

Stillbirth by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

 

On a platform, I heard someone call out your name:

No, Laetitia, no.

It wasn’t my train—the doors were closing,

but I rushed in, searching for your face.

 

But no Laetitia. No.

No one in that car could have been you,

but I rushed in, searching for your face:

no longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two.

 

No one in that car could have been you.

Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen.

No longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two:

I sometimes go months without remembering you.

 

Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen:

I was told not to look. Not to get attached—

I sometimes go months without remembering you.

Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.

 

I was told not to look. Not to get attached.

It wasn’t my train—the doors were closing.

Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.

On a platform, I heard someone calling your name.

Writers Workshop: Pantoum

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Poems that sway like a Malay palm

Poems that sway like a Malay palm

PANTOUM

A pantun is a traditional Malay form of quatrain-based poetry. Victor Hugo introduced it to France in 1829, calling it pantoum. The westernized pantoum descended from a specific form: pantun berkait, which repeats whole lines in an interlocking pattern. The second and fourth lines of any stanza become the first and third lines of the stanza that follows. In the pantoum's last stanza, the first and third lines of the opening stanza are finally repeated as the fourth and second lines. The order of those lines can be reversed, but ideally a pantoum will end with the poem's opening line, creating a kind of circle. Pantoums are not required to rhyme, but most do. They can vary from two stanzas to as many as you wish to write.

Composing a pantoum is a great writing warm-up. You first write a stanza of four lines. The pantoum will work best if the lines are fairly intact, evocative phrases of similar length or rhythm -- each expressing just one basic idea or image that can resonate in different ways when placed in a new context, as they will be throughout the poem. Most of your work in setting the tone and sense goes into laying this foundational stanza, because by the second stanza, you’ll see the poem start to take on a life and significance of its own, while you just follow along or nudge it into shape with an additional line here and there. Allow the wave-like quality of the form to carry you along. Be spontaneous. Allow for happy accidents and juxtapositions. Once you get to the end you’ll probably need to go back and edit a couple of lines to fit into the rhythm that’s developed. This form demonstrates the power of the line. If you have an old poem lying about that isn’t working, but some of the lines are keepers, or an orphaned line running through your head, start a pantoum with one of those lines. This works especially well for couplets that start to sound a bit sing-songy; the pantoum form aerates them – giving breathing space between the rhymes and finding depth in the repetitions. This also works in reverse, as your pantoum might generate one perfect line that starts a whole new piece. Writing a poem in any form is a challenge. Give it what you have today. There might be a glaring hole or clunky line that you know you need to come back to. Start a new project and go back to this one next week when you can hear the poem as a whole with fresh ears and respond accordingly. Getting started is as easy as copying and printing the form below. Stuck for a first line? Scroll down further for some ideas there. Make it rhyme ABAB and it will start writing itself after that.

_________________________________________________________________ (Line 1)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 2)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 3)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 4)

_________________________________________________________________ (Line 2)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 5)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 4)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 6)

_________________________________________________________________ (Line 5)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 7)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 6)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 8)

_________________________________________________________________ (Line 7)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 3)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 8)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 1)

I find this a very meditative form. The wave-like structure encourages movement in place, like something caught in the tide just off shore. The water churns up deeper layers, but by definition you end up where you began. You swirl around a thought until you come to rest. If you have a phrase, mantra, or story that just won't let you go, maybe it's a pantoum.

When I introduced this form at church for a Lenten devotional writing class, I suggested starting with a biblical phrase...

Ideas for opening lines/ texts: 

“Dust you are and to dust you will return”/ Genesis 3

“Do not put the Lord your God to the test”/ Matthew 4

“[And afterward] I will pour out my spirit on all people”/ Joel 2

“This inheritance is kept in heaven for you”/ 1 Peter 1

“Revive us, and we will call on your name”/ Psalm 80

“You will be like a well-watered garden”/ Isaiah 58

“Work out your salvation with fear and trembling”/ Philippians 2

“It is written about me in the scroll”/ Hebrews 10

“He loved them to the end”/ John 13

“She has done a beautiful thing to me”/ Matthew 26

Give it a try! I’ll post the results of my writing exercise tomorrow, as well as a much finer example.

To the Tune of “The Lilies of the Covenant:” A Psalm 80 Haibun

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To the Tune of “The Lilies of the Covenant:” A Haibun

by Jenn Cavanaugh

(Yesterday I posted about the haibun form. I wrote this one for our church’s Lenten Devotional to accompany Psalm 80.)

Restore us, O God

make your face shine on us

that we may be saved

– Psalm 80:3

Scripture often compares us to grass, to flowers, to trees. We are plants of the field, of the garden, of the wilds – rambling, bristling roses; burning, flowering bushes; a host of succulents storing water in the driest deserts; swaying oasis palms flagging hidden sources of water; tumbleweeds that mark the sand and frame the next generation of climbing plants. We sprawl through the wilderness toward a land of streams, a land cleared of everything that doesn’t yield fruit.

Consider the vine

without fangs or teeth or arms

it survives nations

The strength of a vine is its tenacity in springing back, in adapting to the place it is planted. The terms of its survival are unconditioned – a mark of the people of the God who preserves and glories in faithful remnants. The vine’s response to being trampled is to renew its grip on the good earth, anchor itself with the buried tendrils, and keep growing. When cut back mercilessly, the broken bits form new shoots. The vine’s long stems are designed to break new ground and cover it, not to stand on their own. One lonely strand epitomizes the frail, but as a whole it establishes itself in heaps, disregards artificial limits, surmounts impediments, drapes itself lightly over inhospitable terrain, and clambers toward the sun at every opportunity.

Photo by CameliaTWU/ Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/photos/cameliatwu/3992092192

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rooted in motion

Runners commit to earth and sky

Morning glory

Writers Workshop: Haibun

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Once or twice a year I’ll put together a guided writing workshop for our adult education time at church. I’ve found that introducing different forms and themes each week limbers us up to experiment with something new and gives us a nudge to get started rather than staring at blank sheets of paper. No one feels the need to write something expert in a form they’ve never encountered before or on a subject they just started thinking about five minutes ago. The writing is fresher, and people are consistently surprised by what they come up with. I think I have enough material to share at this point that I’ll make my intros to these forms and themes into their own “Writers Workshop” category.

The haibun form combines haiku and prose poetry. Originally it was a form of travelogue or journal writing. Writers pause in their poetic narrative or description of an event, person, place, or thing to compose a haiku that captures the emotions of their experience or encounter. The effect is that of a transfer of memory, whether real or imagined. The descriptive narrative evokes the senses with concise, poetic langauge, usually in the present tense, drawing the reader into a dreamy immediacy. The haiku functions to further the narrative or comment on it through summary or juxtaposition. Good haibun, like haiku, favors impressionism over abstraction. Don’t muse about how children grow up and leave us. Tell me about how your hand, now stuffed in a pocket, used to be both colder and warmer holding hers in this park. Then show me the indentation in the grass of the empty nest.

There are many examples to be found at Contemporary Haibun Online, and I’ll post one I wrote tomorrow.

Culling, Cultural Consumption, and the Myth of Eternal Boredom

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I just happened upon “The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going to Miss Almost Everything”  by Linda Holmes. It struck me as Lenten in tone, in the sense of learning to choose one good thing over another and learning to live in the balance of healthy grief and letting go.

It also fits with what I try to articulate in my book about approaching cultural goods and literacy as a Christian. I’ll pull in some significant quotes, but it’s worth reading here in its entirety.

there are really only two responses if you want to feel like you’re well-read, or well-versed in music, or whatever the case may be: culling and surrender.

Culling is the choosing you do for yourself. It’s the sorting of what’s worth your time and what’s not worth your time. It’s saying, “I deem Keeping Up With The Kardashians a poor use of my time, and therefore, I choose not to watch it.” It’s saying, “I read the last Jonathan Franzen book and fell asleep six times, so I’m not going to read this one.”

Surrender, on the other hand, is the realization that you do not have time for everything that would be worth the time you invested in it if you had the time, and that this fact doesn’t have to threaten your sense that you are well-read…. It is the recognition that well-read is not a destination; there is nowhere to get to, and if you assume there is somewhere to get to, you’d have to live a thousand years to even think about getting there, and by the time you got there, there would be a thousand years to catch up on.

I carry around with me distinct memories of conversations with wonderfully engaged people who decided Christianity was not for them because they deemed heaven boring. If it literally consists of throwing down a single crown then standing around forever in a white robe, I’d have to agree. I think we’ll be free to come and go from the throneroom. I think the new heaven and the new earth will include all the best of the current heaven and earth – anything made with lasting value. The nations will bring their treasures, and we’ll wander the stacks in the Library at Alexandria and the galleries of the Hermitage, hit homers at Wrigley Field, do a little restoration work then catch some improv at the Globe Theatre, kick back at a Chinese movie palace, have falafel with Tolstoy, and meditate in the stone garden of Ryoanji.

I could see Ryoanji becoming one of Augustine’s favorite thinking spots.

Best of all we’ll have the freedom and time to enjoy these places and artifacts in perfect relationship with others and to make more wonders together. And when they inspire us to the classic prayer “Wow,” we’ll know we’re heard and by Whom. Any time someone applauds our efforts, we’ll head back to the throneroom with that spiffy new crown, pausing to play pick-up games of frisbee with it along the way to give others credit where due, toss it in the pile, and sing a spell. The ancient Greeks envisioned a placid eternity without novelty. Jesus comes to make all things new.

What I’ve observed in recent years is that many people, in cultural conversations, are far more interested in culling than in surrender. And they want to cull as aggressively as they can. After all, you can eliminate a lot of discernment you’d otherwise have to apply to your choices of books if you say, “All genre fiction is trash.” You have just massively reduced your effective surrender load, because you’ve thrown out so much at once.

The same goes for throwing out foreign films, documentaries, classical music, fantasy novels, soap operas, humor, or westerns. I see people culling by category, broadly and aggressively: television is not important, popular fiction is not important, blockbuster movies are not important. Don’t talk about rap; it’s not important. Don’t talk about anyone famous; it isn’t important. And by the way, don’t tell me it is important, because that would mean I’m ignoring something important, and that’s … uncomfortable. That’s surrender.

It’s an effort, I think, to make the world smaller and easier to manage, to make the awareness of what we’re missing less painful.

This sort of aggressive culling heightens culture war tensions in the unspoken name of self-protection; we cannot categorically dismiss hip hop or sci-fi or romantic comedy without communicating categorical dismissal of those who identify culturally with the genre. Pretty much anything you can’t be bothered with has changed another person’s life, and the larger that mental category, the truer that statement becomes. This is why I believe that Christians need to learn this balance of being discriminating without being discriminatory. We follow a Savior who came to break down the dividing walls of Jew and Greek, male and female, and so on. Adopting this vocabulary of culling and surrender would be preferable to us slamming entire swaths of culture because we heard somewhere they fail to edify. We could claim our preferences for Pixar over Saw franchises as personal choice rather than holy writ and ascribe our inabilities to enter and understand the worlds of Persian poetry, Japanese anime, and Grey’s Anatomy to our limited human resources of time and attention rather than defensively portraying them as unworthy of them. We can make choices and lament our limitations without making the world artificially small and manageable.

If “well-read” means “not missing anything,” then nobody has a chance. If “well-read” means “making a genuine effort to explore thoughtfully,” then yes, we can all be well-read. But what we’ve seen is always going to be a very small cup dipped out of a very big ocean, and turning your back on the ocean to stare into the cup can’t change that.

We’re human. We are always missing relatively everything. Let’s not pretend otherwise. We can celebrate that there is so much to miss, enjoy what we’ve been given, and look forward to more.