"Great Delight" : Children and the Bible

The author, Emily Garcia, was raised in the Evangelical Free Church. In her freshman year at Princeton she was baptized at the Easter Vigil, and joined the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion four weeks later when she was confirmed on Good Shepherd Sunday. She is in the discernment process for the Episcopal priesthood, is a published poet, and is this year’s Kellogg Fellow at the Chaplaincy.

John Henry Newman, almost
as handsome as Paul

 “I was brought up from a child to take great delight in reading the Bible . . .”

-John Henry Newman, from Apologia pro vita sua

I found this sentence at the opening of an old, worn book on my shelves: Selected Prose and Poetry of John Henry Newman. (Not to be confused with the other Newmans, Paul the actor and Arnold the photographer.) It’s old and worn because it was printed in 1907 (“Price, paper, 30 cents”)—not because I’ve read it so many times. I heard of Newman and his importance to Anglicanism and Catholicism ages ago, and thought I’d finally give his prose a go.

I confess, I found it slow-going. And through the long sentences, big ideas, and reams of dates and unknown names, my attention kept returning to this opening line of the chapter “The Young Mind of Newman,” from his Apologia pro vita sua.

“Delight” is a lovely word, and right next to it are the ideas of satisfaction, joy, pleasure, and deliciousness. This is certainly how I feel about reading the Bible. Even when the taste is bitter—the Psalmist’s virulence, the prophets’ violence, Paul’s harshness—it is delicious, a thrill. 

             I teach Sunday school at St. John’s in Charlestown, and I hope very much that as my sweet three-year-olds and saucy five-year-olds become older and wiser (and taller than me, and smart-alecks)—I hope they will continue to be brought up “to take great delight in reading the Bible.” Certainly they delight in it now!

The curriculum we use is called “Godly Play,” and its premise (or the premise to which I’m most faithful) is that we need to teach kids HOW to engage with the Bible and with Christian traditions—it’s not useful for them to memorize the books of the Bible if they are too terrified or bored or disenchanted to open the pages! This is part of why I kept returning to this sentence of Newman’s: because it says “brought up to take delight.” Some of us will love the Bible and love reading it no matter what people say to us about it. But many children—and young adults, and adults—need to be shown how to take delight in such a contradictory and complex text.

            So may I make a recommendation? If there are any children, teens, or young adults in your life, I would encourage you to share with them what the Bible means to you. Does it confuse you? Then say so! Do you find it funny at times? Show them what makes you giggle! Does it move you to tears? Give them the chapter and verse! Is there a character you remember, a scene that stands out in your mind? Mention it in conversation! You don’t need to be a scholar or have the whole thing perfect in order to share what you love.

            And if you don’t have any feelings about the Bible? Perhaps you might listen extra close to the lectionary readings this Sunday, and see what you think—and what you feel, and what you imagine, and what they make you think of.

"A Very Human Book": Hannah's Song and Reading the Bible

This sermon was delivered on 18 November 2012 by our Micah Fellow, Tiffany Curtis. The readings for the day are available here. 

 

In our readings today we hear Hannah struggle with her sense of anguish and distress over her lot in life. She is irritated, provoked, weeping, praying. She won’t eat. She is so immersed in her grief that Eli believes her to be drunk. 15But Hannah answers, ‘No, my lord, I am a woman deeply troubled; I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord.’ Eli tells her that she should go in peace, for God will grant her petition. Hannah indeed becomes pregnant—the desire of her heart, according to the scriptures—and she gives birth to the prophet Samuel.

Then come the famous words of the Song of Hannah, echoed in the gospel of Luke in the Song of Mary. Hannah sings a song primarily of joy. It is triumphant, and also full of energy and complex images and emotions. It speaks of justice for those who have been forgotten, neglected, marginalized. It gives glory to God for lifting up the oppressed. And it also states clearly that this joy and justice is in opposition to others, that it is defined by its opposite…

Hannah says: my mouth derides my enemies, their bows are broken, they are without jobs or food, they are forlorn. Those who were full of food will go hungry, the rich will be poor. The wicked shall be cut off in darkness, and God’s adversaries shattered…This is not just some feel-good love song to God. This is a complicated text, and like much of scripture, we are invited to sort out what it might mean for us in our lives.

Particularly thinking about the experience many of us have just had, of working together with other people of faith so that the hungry might be fed, these texts sound a little incongruent to my ear. I just worked for 2 hours side-by-side with people of many nations, skin colors, faiths--including a faith in reason and humanity rather than a faith in God. And now I come to church and I hear that those who are not like me, those who in biblical times might even have been called my enemies--deserve my scorn and the wrath of the Lord.

We have a few options. We can accept this book as the literal Word of God, including the parts we don’t like, and perhaps dig in and explore some of the darker aspects of God as portrayed in scripture. I think this merits much more reflection than it is ever given in more liberal Christian contexts, where the love of God is emphasized above all else. But that’s not what I am going to explore tonight. We can also spiritualize this kind of thing and view it metaphorically: crushing our enemies can mean the enemy forces within us, the complexities and darkness that we find within ourselves, those tendencies that threaten to pull us away from our truest selves, from our faith. An internal struggle. This sort of allegorical reading of the Bible can be extremely beneficial, and has a noble history in Christianity, particularly pre-Enlightenment. But I am not going to go into that approach either.

What I do want to talk about is something that has been so present in my heart since one of the brothers at the Society of Saint John the Evangelist preached last month on the psalms. He said that the psalms are powerful because they hold the full range of human emotions, including joy and including murderous rage. And that by delving into the psalms together we are acknowledging the breadth of human experience, and honoring emotions that might not be our own. This resonated with me so much because one of things I have always loved about the Bible is how darn contradictory it is. It offers different accounts of stories side-by-side, and shows us the lives of faithful heroes and moral idiots alike, sometimes in the same person. The Bible has always seemed like a very human book to me, and that’s much of what makes it holy for me. We humans have been struggling to relate to the divine and to each other for millennia, and much of that struggle is depicted so colorfully and beautifully in our scriptures. That means that we find parts of the Bible that can be hard to swallow, mixed right in with incredibly moving images of Godly and human justice and compassion. We find the deliciously erotic love poetry of the Song of Songs in the same book that we find stories of mass rape and murder, of men betraying their own brothers.

In our world, too, in a single moment you can observe a couple hand in hand in Harvard Square, obviously rapturously in love, and then almost trip over someone who has lost a limb, whose face is red and blotchy from exposure to sun and cold, and whose hand is outstretched, a thin paper cup held between nicotine-stained fingers, and whose defeated eyes look at you imploringly. This is the nature of reality. The complexity, the contrast, the both/and is what it means to be a human being!

The simple ways of reading the texts of our lives, of reading the holy texts we have been given by our ancestors, is usually not the most compelling. It’s not compelling because it flattens an inherently bumpy topography. It ignores shadows and wrinkles and scars. It refuses to see reality as it really is.

This week I was at dinner with a really fascinating group of women, including two psychologists. Pam, who does mindfulness work as part of her psychotherapy practice, shared that a psychologist had done a study on survivors of the Holocaust who had thrived in their lives even after surviving death camps. This researcher wanted to know what traits these survivors shared that made this possible. According to Pam, what she found was that they all saw reality as it was. In other words, they were clear-eyed about reality.

I wonder if engaging fully with scripture as it really is can help us practice engaging life as it really is, including the things that we don’t like, including the most painful traumas of our lives. Scripture reflects the complexity of the human experience, and reading it with clear eyes might just help us to be clear-eyed as we move about our society, as well.

In the gospel reading for today, the disciples ask Jesus about how they will know that “things are about to be accomplished.” His response is that they should be wary of people who claim to be him, and to not be alarmed by the news of famines, wars, earthquakes, because these are just the beginning of the birth pangs of what is to come. Once again, this isn’t a Jesus-loves-me-this-I-know Jesus, but a more intense Jesus, warning against people who will lead his disciples astray, warning of catastrophes and tragedies. Following this theme of clear-eyed vision of complex reality, Jesus is essentially telling his disciples just that. He is saying, accept reality as it is, be alert to the complexity of these times. Jesus is saying that God is somehow mysteriously present even in earthquakes and famine and war.

Indeed, somehow God is present in this mad swirling mass of humanity and chaos and stars and dark matter and fish and trees and roaring waters and loneliness. God defies our expectations. God defies our knowing. God defies our sense of time and place and order.

And in that dizzying sense of life’s complexity, in the ways it is reflected in the scriptures, in our friends and family, in our intimate relationships, in our yearning to do good in this world…we have the invitation to accept reality as it is, which includes the possibility of what it could be. Reality as it is includes hope. We have the capacity to come together—hundreds of people in a university hall operating an interfaith assembly line to feed folks, knowing that we are only making a small difference in people’s lives—just one meal, and yet that is a sign of hope!

As the poet Emily Dickinson says, “If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.”  If we can stop one heart from breaking. If we can feed one family in Boston. We shall not live in vain. No matter how great the problems of this world, no matter how complex our human experience, no matter how dark our scriptures, if we have enough love for life to see it as it really is, we have enough to hope. We are not living in vain. We have cause to sing alongside Hannah: My heart exults in the Lord; my strength is exalted in my God!

"She was deeply distressed and prayed to the Lord, and wept bitterly."

On the day when Elkanah sacrificed, he would give portions to his wife Peninnah and to all her sons and daughters; but to Hannah he gave a double portion, because he loved her, though the Lord had closed her womb. Her rival used to provoke her severely, to irritate her, because the Lord had closed her womb. So it went on year after year; as often as she went up to the house of the Lord, she used to provoke her.

Therefore Hannah wept and would not eat. Her husband Elkanah said to her, ‘Hannah, why do you weep? Why do you not eat? Why is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?’

After they had eaten and drunk at Shiloh, Hannah rose and presented herself before the Lord. Now Eli the priest was sitting on the seat beside the doorpost of the temple of the Lord. She was deeply distressed and prayed to the Lord, and wept bitterly. She made this vow: ‘O Lord of hosts, if only you will look on the misery of your servant, and remember me, and not forget your servant, but will give to your servant a male child, then I will set him before you as a nazirite until the day of his death. He shall drink neither wine nor intoxicants,  and no razor shall touch his head.’

As she continued praying before the Lord, Eli observed her mouth. Hannah was praying silently; only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard; therefore Eli thought she was drunk. So Eli said to her, ‘How long will you make a drunken spectacle of yourself? Put away your wine.’ But Hannah answered, ‘No, my lord, I am a woman deeply troubled; I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord. Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation all this time.’ Then Eli answered, ‘Go in peace; the God of Israel grant the petition you have made to him.’ And she said, ‘Let your servant find favour in your sight.’ Then the woman went to her quarters, ate and drank with her husband, and her countenance was sad no longer.

They rose early in the morning and worshipped before the Lord; then they went back to their house at Ramah. Elkanah knew his wife Hannah, and the Lord remembered her. In due time Hannah conceived and bore a son. She named him Samuel, for she said, ‘I have asked him of the Lord.’

-1 Samuel 1:4-20

She was deeply distressed and prayed to the Lord, and wept bitterly.
For women around the world who daily endure trauma of all kinds: rape, war, systematic violence, miscarriage, the death of children, the inability to bear children, poverty, domestic abuse, intimidation…weeping should not be seen as a sign of weakness, but rather of strength. Likewise, weeping is not merely a personal emotional outpouring, but also a potent vehicle for social and spiritual transformation—as seemingly impassive or tyrannical human beings and even God are moved by tears. Weeping itself becomes a form of discourse—one that resists easy answers and demands solidarity. In the uncertain space of overwhelming sorrow and injustice, when God and humanity may seem callous or absent, tears can invoke God’s presence and mercy, whether in the form of a “supernatural” miracle like the conception of Samuel, or in a miraculous flowering of human solidarity, courage, and compassion.

In an essay on gendered emotional expression in the United States, anthropologist Catherine Lutz points to the complexity of emotion, arguing that it is not just an internal feeling, but also a social discourse with gendered dimensions. Catherine Lutz even argues, “Any discourse on emotion is also, at least implicitly, a discourse on gender.”[1]  She looks specifically at the question of emotional control, writing, “Talk about emotional control in and by women, in other words, is talk about power and its exercise.”[2] Performing socially in a way that is “out of control” (weeping bitterly, as Hannah does) is a show of power, even if the weeper is simultaneously regarded as weak and imbalanced, as the notion of uncontrolled, messy emotions is one that seems to incite fear.  Indeed, Catherine Lutz notes that “Western discourse on emotions constitutes them as paradoxical entities that are both a sign of weakness and a powerful force.”[3] This is particularly true for women, who have so often been seen as dangerous and volatile when emotional.[4]

Kimberley Patton and J.S. Hawley write in the introduction to Holy Tears, “weeping can evoke divine response, especially compassion or mercy, where none had previously been forthcoming.”[5] Weeping seems to be a way to connect with and struggle with God that is sometimes deeper or more effective than verbal prayer and intercession. When Hannah cries out bitterly in her sorrowful prayer at Shiloh, God seems to listen in a way that Hannah had not experienced previously in her grieving over her “closed womb.”

Devotion to saints and spiritual ancestors like Hannah or others who cry can also be part of a communal practice of “transpersonal” weeping.  Womanist ethicist Emilie Townes emphasizes the theological and social importance of communal lament, arguing that the ritual of lament to God publically articulates problems, and thus has the power to help the community understand the crisis as more “bearable and manageable,”[6] perhaps thereby facilitating its resolution. While weeping is obviously often nonverbal, communal weeping seems to serve a similar theological and social role to what Townes identifies in verbal ritual lament, perhaps taking communities to the places too deep and dark even for words, and expressing that which cannot be said otherwise. Public lamentation and weeping are not just theological practices of crying out for God’s mercy, but are also forms of social protest, as they break the silences around suffering and injustice.

(1) Lutz, Catherine. “Engendered emotion: gender, power, and the rhetoric of emotional control in American discourse,” in Language and the Politics of Emotion, ed. Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)

(2) Lutz, “Engendered emotion”

(3) Lutz, “Engendered emotion”

(4) See Tom Lutz, “Men and Women, Infants and Children” in Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1999)

(5) Kimberley Patton and John Stratton Hawley, ed., Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 2

(6) Emilie M. Townes, Breaking the Fine Rain of Death: African American Health Issues and a Womanist Ethic of Care (New York: Continuum, 1998), 23

A New Anglican Reads Old Things: "We sleep in the same bed / but seldom meet."

Emily Garcia was raised in the Evangelical Free Church. In her freshman year at Princeton she was baptized at the Easter Vigil, and joined the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion four weeks later when she was confirmed on Good Shepherd Sunday. She is in the discernment process for the Episcopal priesthood, is a published poet, and is this year’s Kellogg Fellow at the Chaplaincy. In this column she will take a piece of “old” (or older) literature as a starting point for an informal reflection on the religious life.

There’s a song called “One by One,” and it’s been one of my favorite songs since I first heard it. You can listen to it here, on NPR.  It was written “around 3 a.m.”, sung in a slow, steady voice by a woman named Connie Converse, and recorded in her friend’s house at a dinner party in 1954. Twenty years later, Ms. Converse packed up her things and drove off, and was never heard from again.

            “We go walking in the dark,” she sings. “We go walking out at night— / and it’s not as lovers go, two by two, to and fro, / but it’s one by one—one by one, in the dark.”

            About five hundred years before Ms. Converse was born, a man named Kabir was born to a family which had recently converted from Hinduism to Islam. He became a major figure in what we now called “the bhakti movement”—a movement of devotion whose disciples spoke to their God in immediate, intensely personal language, taking images from both Hinduism and Islam, and disregarding or opposing the orthodoxies and hierarchies of both traditions.

These poets—Kabir, Mirabai, Janabai, and others—speak in a language that would be familiar to the Psalmist(s), to the author of the Song of Songs, as well as to many Christians from different times and traditions. It is a language of “passionate devotion” and “inward love,” as the translator Arvind Krishna Mehrotra says. Here’s one of Mehrotra’s translations:

               My husband is called Hari,**

               And I’m his young wife.

               My husband is called Rama,**

               He’s an inch taller than me.

  

               Looking my best,

               I go in search of Hari,

               The lord of three worlds.

               He’s nowhere to be found.

               We live under the same roof,

               Sleep in the same bed,

               But seldom meet.

               Fortunate the bride, says Kabir,

               Whose husband loves her.

Now this, I thought, was something that Connie Converse would also understand. Kabir and the object of his devotion are together, but “not as lovers go, two by two, to and fro,” but “one by one.” In the second verse, Converse sings, “We go walking out at night. / As we wander through the grass / we can hear each other pass / but we’re far apart—far apart, in the dark.”

When I first thought of these two texts posed side by side, I had suddenly an image of myself walking through a field of liturgy—murmuring the Nicene Creed, mouthing petitions, following the rise and fall of the Great Thanksgiving with my head and heart entirely somewhere else. The liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer is the bed I sleep in, the field I walk in—the services of the Daily Office, the rites of Holy Eucharist, and the many prayers for many different situations. Like Kabir and Converse, I believe that the object of my love and devotion is near, but at times—for days, or weeks, or months—“we seldom meet.”

I thought of what the Psalmist says: “I was like a brute beast in your presence” (73:22b). And then I remembered how this Psalm continues: “Yet I am always with you; / you hold me by my right hand. . . . Whom have I in heaven but you? / and having you I desire nothing upon earth” (23, 25).

And this, too, is something that Converse knows, as she closes her song with this verse: “We are walking in the dark. / If I had your hand in mine / I could shine, I could shine / like the rising sun—like the sun.”

**Mehrotra notes that while “Hari” and “Rama” are names of specific deities in Hindu mythology, here Kabir uses them as names for “his personal god,” a god beyond such identifications.)