I have a B.A. in Religion.  That was one result of looking for “the answer.”  I eventually found my answer.  And sometimes, as now, I have to talk with people very dear to me, whose answer is different.

It’s awkward to discuss matters of faith, religion, spirituality — whatever word one chooses — when there are differences in belief, even (maybe even especially) between people who care about one another.  Beliefs are deeply held, and it can be too easy too get into arguments about which belief system is right or wrong in ways that hurt each other.  But if we don’t risk the awkwardness, then instead there’s silence…which also hurts.

I’ve been having a conversation with someone dear to me about this religion stuff.  It’s been a sporadic conversation, because it’s been an awkward one.  But if argument is one way, and silence is another, there’s also a third way: to accept the awkwardness, while resisting the urge to argue.  If I love someone, then I want to listen and to know what’s in her heart, his heart —and I want that person I love to be able to know what’s in mine.  Not to argue, but simply to speak from one’s heart, in hopes that one’s interlocutor will listen, even if s/he disagrees.

This post is based upon things I’ve written on my side of the conversation.

I have been cautioned that it’s an unforgivable sin to deny Jesus Christ as the Son of God and our Savior.  I don’t believe there is such a thing as an unforgivable sin, at least not in any ultimate sense.  On a human level — just people being people, no god in the mix — some people will forgive each other for things that other people won’t.  The thing that sticks out in my mind with Jesus was when he said, of the very men who were killing him, “Forgive them father, for they know not what they do.” That’s what I believe of Jesus, whom many call Christ — that he had compassion even for his own murderers (which is what they were, even if they had the “law” of their time and place to “justify” their execution of him), because he knew how confused and limited human understanding can be.

That’s where I place myself, too, as a limited human being often confused about this or that, and knowing I have no final answers for everything I meet or see in the world.  But no other human being is any more empowered to give out final answers than I am: every one of us is limited.  And so I don’t believe in any such thing as inerrancy of, say, the Bible, because the people who wrote down its words were human beings.  So were the people who copied down the Bible’s words for later generations, so were those who translated those words into Latin or English or any other language.  So were all those who spoke or wrote down and propagated the words and ideas of Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, and every other religion.  And being human beings, however much they strove to know and understand the mystery that we call God, they made mistakes. Unfortunately, they also often institutionalized those mistakes in ways that brought uncountable harms to other people — often even to themselves.

I’m not a Christian, nor have I been one in at least  since junior high, because I reject the notion that there is only one way to approach or to believe about god — a notion of exclusivity that is  commonly held amongst Christians, as it is also by adherents of other religions.  If I have a confession of belief, it’s the one I’ve used for years: God is the universe and everything in it.  Illimitable god, I called it in a poem I wrote a couple of years ago: incapable of being limited or bounded, measureless — that is far beyond what I or any human being can completely comprehend or contain.  As my calculus tutor in high school taught me: No system can contain a metasystem.

And so god shows it/him/herself in ways that are infinite in their variety.  Jesus was and is a son of god, but so are all of us are children of god.  And following from that, I believe that Jesus was not the savior, but was a savior: not for having died crucified for our sins but because he taught his followers (and all of us who still heed his teachings rather than only the circumstances and meaning of his death) an understanding and a compassion, even at the point of his own death, that few of us reach even on our best days.  The thing he said that I love the best is: “The Kingdom of God is within you” — and within the limits of my own understanding, I do my best to live according to the goodness, the godness, that is within all of us to live by, if only we choose to.  Righteousness is another word that some use: to live in right relationship with ourselves, with each other, and with illimitable god and the illimitable creation that is one with it.

Being limited, I may be wrong about any of the conclusions I’ve formed so far about the world and god. No “conclusion” that I can make can be final anyway.  If it turns out I’ll be judged and damned for believing as I do by some specific God of some specific ideological belief system — well, mainly that’ll mean that, much to my disappointment, the universe is run by a Big Bully of the Sky who has all the morality of a Hitler, a Stalin, a Muammar Gadaffi, or even that putative enemy of the Christianist God, Satan.

But I don’t think so.

I will meantime try to base my judgments of other people on their actions — whether they do good or cause harm — not on the name by which their faith is called.  When I have problems with some Christians, it’s when they attempt to justify behaving harmfully and hatefully towards others in the name of their religion — not because they are Christians per se. And so with Muslims, Buddhists, whoever — anyone who attempts to justify harmful behavior in the name of religion, and treat their religion as not religion, but ideology: not Muslims but Islamists, not Christians but Christianists. Religion become ideology has ceased to be religion: it’s just ideology, in all its nasty worldliness, used as a club to namecall, batter, murder, and war upon people who believe differently.

So many of the disagreements between people that lead to anger and hatred and war anyway are not really based in who and what they are fundamentally as people, but on the the names they’re called by — Republican, Democrat, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, whatever.  Does god care more that call upon him (or her!) by one name rather than another? — or that we behave toward one another and toward the creation we have all been gifted to live within with respect, love, and the best effort of our hearts and minds?  God has as many ways to enter into people, as there are people: we all have our own language, and god knows them all.

From another poem of mine,

God cannot be enclosed in a book
or in the miser’s soul
which portions out justice in dribbles
and rations out love in crumbs,
then wonders why we starve.

God is too wide and vast and long
and knows us for what we are
as is known the sky, the river, the rocks,
as is knows each creature that breathes.

God is too wide, too vast, too long
and knows us as we are.

Since I’m still engaged in the awkward & sporadic conversation that gave rise to this post, I’ve been thinking a lot more about religion again, and will probably be writing more about it too.  Meanwhile, here are some of the other posts I’ve written about religion, religious/political ideologies, & my own personal god stuff.

• A brief spiritual history (27 Apr 2006)
• The god thing (30 Apr 2006)
• Hiisi (15 May 2006)
• Sermon (a poem) (17 May 2009; poem written in 1992)
• Religion v. belief (19 May 2009)
• Christianist, defined (23 Jun 2009)
• No Questions, Questions (poem) (24 Jun 2009)
• James Dobson’s God is a child abuser, & so is Jerry Prevo’s (22 Sep 2009)
• Job 42.13 (poem) (9 Jan 2010; poem written in 1995)
• Helping Haiti (& telling Pat Robertson to STFU) (13 Jan 2010)
• Integrity, violation, healing (21 Apr 2010)
• Metsän henki (poem) (30 Apr 2010; poem written in 2000)

Related posts:

1. Religion v. belief
2. An indictment of the Christian heresy followed by Palin & friends
3. God of Mosquitoes (poem)

This porridge isn't congealed. But I needed a photo to illustrate the post, & this came closest. It's entitled "Breakfast with Dexter": people who have seen the title sequence to the Showtime series "Dexter" know what I talking about. It's actually just an innocent serving of steelcut oats with raspberries and walnuts. Yum.

I don’t know why anyone would search on congealed remains of porridge.  Nonetheless, yesterday not just one, but two searches on that term led people to my blog.

If you Google on that search term yourself, you’ll find two results beating out my blog for the highest ranked searches.

Top honors goes to “In Vietnam, Cauldrons on Every Corner” by David Farley in the New York Times for 21 Mar 2010, which story begins,

“You like congealed pigs’ blood?” my travel companion asked, pulling me over to a street cart in Ho Chi Minh City. Before I could answer, two bowls of chao, a rice porridge bobbing with slices of pork sausage and cubes of coagulated blood, were plopped in our hands.

Pig’s blood porridge? It’s like a conflation of “Goldilocks & the Three Bears” & the “Three Little Pigs”!  But the story’s worth a read: it’s about a culinary tour of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) led by Michael Huynh, one of New York’s top Vietnamese chef’s & restaurateurs. The article had a similar effect on me as the Vietnam passages of Anthony Bourdain‘s A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines: it makes me really want to visit Vietnam and try some of that great food. Maybe even pig’s blood porridge!

Failing a trip to Vietnam, maybe I’ll reread Bourdain’s book and visit my local Vietnamese restaurant.

The next highest search result is a detailed answer to the question, “When are liquids considered like solids? [liquids: congealed]“ from “The Gisi Turkel Maseches Nazir: Outlines of Halachos from the DAF” prepared by Rabbi P. Feldman of Kollel Iyun Hadaf, Yerushalayim (Jerusalem).  This was more difficult reading for me, as it contained a number of unfamiliar terms — though I did see pretty quickly that it had to do with Jewish dietary law.

Halachos, Wikipedia reveals, is “the collective body of Jewish law, including biblical law (the 613 mitzvot) and later talmudic and rabbinic law, as well as customs and traditions,” and Kollel Iyun Hadaf is a group of Jewish religious scholars, teachers, and writers operating from P’nei Shmuel Synagogue of Har Nof, Jerusalem. One of its rabbis, Rabbi Pesach Feldman, is charged with preparing point-by-point outlines for the Dafyomi Advancement Forum (DAF). Daf yomi, meaning literally page of the day (or, more accurately, folio of the day, because both sides of the page are studied), is, per Wikipedia, “a daily regimen undertaken to study the Babylonian Talmud one folio…a day. Under this regimen, the entire Talmud would be completed, one day at a time, in a cycle of seven and a half years.” Thousands of Jews worldwide participate daily in this study of the Talmud, a central record of Jewish rabbinic discussions on Jewish law, ethics, philosophy, customs, and history.

So what this search result landed me on was a point-by-point outline intended to assist students of Talmud around the world in their daily study — in this case, a folio from Nazir, a treatise of the Talmud “devoted chiefly to a discussion of the laws of the Nazirite laid down in Numbers 6: 1–21″ of the Hebrew Bible (per Wikipedia).

I like knowing this. I like having stumbled upon an entire web of human relationship in which men and women around the world are deepening their connections to one another and to their faith.

But what about the third search result? This is the one that actually landed two people on my blog: on the story “Goldilocks & the Three Bears: A Retelling” — the only one of the top three search results, I might add, that includes the terms congealed remained of porridge as a complete, unified phrase.  [Patting myself on the back.]

Baby Bear has a rough go of it in "Goldilocks & the Three Bears: A Retelling"

The fifth search result, incidentally, lands people in my Flickr photostream at the picture that inspired the story, and where the story first appeared.  I wrote the tale for a Flickr group called “Lost Objects” that a friend of mine started in 2006.  “I like to go hiking,” my friend said, “and when I do, I come across a lot of lost objects. These objects raise questions, stories and that’s why I thought of creating a group were anyone can put their photos of lost objects they found and, if they want, tell a story about it, true or just imagination.” My lost object was an abandoned red & white teddy bear I spotted one day at Fairbanks Street & E. Northern Lights Boulevard in Anchorage.

“Goldilocks & the Three Bears: A Retelling” also has the distinction of being the 10th most popular post on my blog, with 603 hits to date.  It’s my second most popular post that has nothing to do with politics (the first being “Queensland floods” with 1,007 hits to date), which gives it a special place in my heart, since Henkimaa is trying really hard not to be a politics blog, and to be much more about stuff that feeds my spirit, like my writing.

And like laughter.  Because this story is also funny.  So please feel encouraged to increase my “not about politics” stats by clicking through & reading it.

(Disclaimer: there’s no conflation with the “Three Little Pigs.”)

I close with a special hat tip to Steve Aufrecht, whose posts about weird Google searches on his blog What Do I Know? served as inspiration for this post.

Related posts:

1. Goldilocks & the Three Bears: A Retelling
2. Now I REALLY feel like a writer again
3. Momentum through Mystery

Boney Courthouse, Alaska Court System (photo taken 11 Sep 2010)

Crossposted 9 Feb 2011 at The Mudflats.
Lots of comments there.

Anthony Rollins: he’s the suspended Anchorage Police Department officer  on trial right now in Anchorage Superior Court, accused of sexually assaulting multiple women, over a 3-year period, while he was on duty — in uniform, using his patrol car and police substations to effect his (alleged) crimes.  Anyone who’s been following me on Facebook or Twitter knows that I’ve been following the Twitter feed of (especially) KTVA news reporter Grace Jang, who has livetweeted four of the five days of the the trial so far.

A Facebook friend of mine asked me yesterday why I had such a strong interest in the Rollins trial.  Here’s my answer.

I’ve never been a victim of sexual assault myself, or any other sexual predation, though of course I have friends & acquaintances who have.

My particular interest in this case started in late 2009 when I read reports via the local liberal blogosphere about the massing of Rollins’ supporters — mainly from his church — at hearings taking place at the courthouse, such that (alleged) victims & their families could barely get into the courthouse. I wrote a blog post at the time called “How to be a friend to an accused serial rapist” which focused on one of my interests in cases like this: how people who really love/care about an (alleged or actual) offender should show that love/care. Should they just take the accused person’s protestations of innocence at face value? Or should they weigh the evidence & help the accused person, if actually guilty, face the guilt & its consequences? (Which is what I say they should do.)

Bigtime thorny ethical question that we see zillions of examples of all the time, & frequently (as now) attended by claims about the accused person’s religious faith. On Monday, according to Grace Jang’s tweets from the courtroom, an Internal Affair investigator testified about finding gold-wrapped condoms, Alaska Public Safety Information Network (APSIN) printouts (i.e., criminal records), a previously unknown-to-his-superiors cellphone, containers of (partly consumed) liquor, & other suspicious evidence in Rollins’ patrol car. Questioning the IA officer, Rollins’ defense attorney elicited the admission that Internal Affairs had also found a Bible in his car.

Sure. A Bible in his patrol unit, and Rollins’ profession of faith as a Christian, are just bound to establish his innocence, or to wipe away all his (alleged) crimes, just as assertion of Christian faith did (in the eyes of some) for, say, disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker — to name but one example of past use of this rubbish argument.

My undergrad degree is a B.A. in Religion, & I’m still very interested in how religious ideologies as opposed to real religion skew people’s thinking & behavior about all kinds of stuff. The religious ideology that says “he’s a Christian, that makes him innocent” or “he’s a Christian, his offenses have been washed away” is one such skew.

God’s mercy and compassion towards sinners is one thing; and indeed may Rollins receive such mercy and compassion, for the sake of his spirit & soul.  But I daresay God’s compassion is also for the victims of crimes such as those alleged here. I daresay God’s concern is not only for the individual salvation or redemption of one sinner, but also with reconciling people who have become alienated from each other through wrongs they have committed against each other.  God’s concern, as it should be our concern regardless of our individual faith, is to restore the relationships that have been damaged & sometimes even destroyed by crime.

If Rollins indeed committed these crimes against these women, it is to them he needs to make apology and from whom he must seek forgiveness; and likewise he bears responsibility towards the rest of us: the community he took an oath to protect and defend, only to violate that oath and duty and to betray the victims, the men and women with whom he served, and the whole of the Anchorage community.   Repentance and redemption come not through hiding behind Bible and cross, or whatever the signs of one’s faith might be.  Repentance and redemption come with honest and unshirking admission of one’s wrongs to the people one has wronged — not only in private confession to one’s God — and a willingness to bear the consequences for those wrongs.  Otherwise, all professions of faith are just words and posturing and spiritual vacancy.  No matter what religion Rollins claims to follow, no matter what book rode in his unit within feet or inches of his gold-wrapped condoms, his bottles of liquor, and the notebook containing the phone number of one of his victims.

Oh yeah.  Alleged victims.  Right.

Aside from that, this trial is a trial under Alaska law before a Superior Court judge of the Alaska Court System, not before the judgment seat of a Christian God as understood by a particular church or a particular believer.

Another of my interests in this case is that after 20 years as a staff member at the UAA Justice Center (though not myself a “justice professional”), I think a lot lot lot about what “justice” really is, & how we bring it about (or don’t); how we could improve the say we “do” justice, how we address (or don’t) abuses of authority, & so on. This has made its way a lot into my writing, both poetry & fiction I’m working on… & being a storymaker, its pretty instructive to watch watch particular stories unfold.

I didn’t write to my friend, but should add here, that opening arguments in Rollins’ trial took place just the day after data from the 2010 Alaska Victimization Survey were presented at a joint meeting of the Alaska Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Health and Social Services Committee, and on the same day that a whole lot of stories about the data appeared in the media. You can get links to media coverage in the UAA Justice Center blog post about the presentation (a blog post which, guess what, I prepared), and also watch the full briefing before the legislators on video presented by Gavel to Gavel Alaska. (See the UAA Justice Center’s website for results of other research on violence against women in Alaska.)

Summary of lifetime estimates of victimization by intimate partner violence and/or sexual violence of Alaska female respondents, from the 2010 Alaska Victimization Survey.

The upshot is this: women are victimized by intimate partner violence and sexual violence at much higher levels than anyone has really understood before — even though we’ve known for a very long time that Alaska consistently the highest rate of forcible rape reported to law enforcement in the U.S.  Why did we not understand just how truly awful the situation was (& is)?  Because most women victimized by sexual & domestic violence — & arguably most men so victimized too, though for reasons discussed in the presentation only women could be included in this survey — do not report their victimization to police.

The abuse of authority alleged in the case of former APD officer Anthony Rollins in pursuit of his alleged crimes is one reason why.  As some of the alleged victims have already testified, they felt intimidated because of his uniform and the power he held as a police officer, and didn’t trust other police to help them if they did report.

Which is all the more reason to ensure that, if Anthony Rollins is guilty of the crimes he is being tried for, that he be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.  He was a sworn officer of the law whose uniform and shield represented his oath to protect — not to abuse and violate. Unless we can trust police and the courts to bring offenders to justice, there’s little chance that we’ll be able to stem the tide of sexual and domestic violence in Alaska.

APD officers and cars at the Performing Arts Center, downtown Anchorage, Feb 2010. May the discredit Anthony Rollins has brought to them & to the Anchorage Police Department be removed. I for one believe that 99% of Anchorage police are damn fine people and a credit to the uniform.

Related posts:

1. Rollins trial, day 6: 5th & 6th alleged victims testify
2. Rollins trial, day 1: Stats on violence against women in Alaska as Rollins trial begins
3. Anthony Rollins, accused serial rapist, found guilty on 18 of 20 charges

Nesbett Courthouse at 4th & I in Anchorage. A demonstration will be held there at noon today in protest of the limited-release of accused serial rapist APD Officer Anthony Rollins, & in support of his victims.

Many years ago, a friend of mine stood accused of a misdemeanor crime involving sexual contact with a minor — a crime he pled no contest to, & for which, based on conversations with him, I felt he bore responsibility.  But nonetheless I went to court with him.  I paid a price for that — turns out that I knew the mother of the youth in the case, & she never forgave me for taking, as she thought it, the side of the man who victimized her son. But the reason I’d gone was not because I judged him innocent (I didn’t), but because a guilty person needs friends in facing his guilt, & facing the consequences of his crime, as much as he’d need friends beside him if he’d been innocent.

Based on accounts in the press of the evidence in the case against Anchorage police officer Anthony Rollins, accused of sexually assaulting six different women while on duty, I’m inclined to believe that he, too, is guilty.  But I’m less certain of the motivations of the numerous people, fellow members of Lighthouse Christian Fellowship, who have been packing the courtroom at Rollins’ hearings to the point — well, I’ll let AK Muckraker’s words speak here, in the Mudflats post she wrote earlier this week:

At the first hearing, according to a source at STAR [Standing Together Against Rape], two victims were forced to fight their way through the mass of people and stand, “crushed against the back wall” by the crowds that had come to give moral support to the man they say sexually assaulted them. “They couldn’t even see,” she said. “The mood of the people who came was like it was some kind of social event.  It was appalling.”

The court room was packed to overflowing, with Rollins’ church supporters filling the defendant’s side of the room, the seats in the jury box, the side of the coutroom usually reserved for the plaintiff, and spilling out into the hall when the room reached capacity. [Ref #1]

Were they there because they’re certain, based on factual evidence, that he’s innocent? Were they there because they believe him guilty & are helping him to face the consequences?  Or were they there based on “he goes to my church & I feel in my heart he’s innocent” evidence (which is hardly evidence) & are thereby not only helping him maintain but actively participating in denial of crimes he’s committed?

In the witness, yet, of the very persons he’s accused of violating?  To the extent that those women, & their friend & families, couldn’t even get a seat?

At least there was some improvement at the latest hearing, last Tuesday:

This time, knowing what awaited them, arrangements were made in advance for the victims and their families to have access to the courtroom and a place to sit down.  What that experience must have been like, facing your accused rapist in a room full of his supporters is to most of us, unimaginable. [Ref #1]

But my questions stand: what are the motives of the churchgoers who are packing the court for Rollins?  At Alaska Commons, John Aronno writes:

Rollins was released on $100,000 bail and is now under house arrest. He also gets field trips every Sunday, because the judge recognized how important it was for him to attend his church. And what church does he attend? Christian Lighthouse Fellowship. And how might the judge have reached the conclusion to release an alleged serial rapist? Well, the fact that the church came together as a “community” in support of Rollins probably helped; Lighthouse parishioners  packed the courthouse, leaving standing room only, even forcing the alleged victims to be packed against the wall while people stood in a pathetic brand of solidarity in support of their fellow Christian; someone who may have raped a half dozen women, while wearing a badge. [Ref #2]

Is this, for members of Lighthouse Christian Fellowship, just a matter of Christian solidarity?  Or shall I say, Christianist solidarity.  Blind support for another believer who may have committed serious crimes is not actually Christian — but fits right in with the Christianist ideology which assumes as a matter of course that only people outside the flock are guilty.

Celtic Diva wrote yesterday about an Anchorage police officer she personally knew who used his position to rape and torture women, & concluded:

I share [this story] now in hopes that supporters of Officer Rollins will open their minds to the possibility that six women are not lying.  I ask them to think back on their relationship with him and remember past inappropriate comments, humor or boundary issues…they have leaked out somewhere, giving hints of his true nature. [Ref #3]

A friend’s duty to a friend who stands accused of a crime is not to blindly assert his innocence — but to discern, to the best of one’s ability, whether he might be guilty. And if he is, to help him face his guilt. And to accept the consequences that are due him.

If any of you are reading this, I hope you’ll think about it.

Meanwhile, a demonstration has been called today for people to support the victims & to protest the preferential treatment this accused serial rapist has already received.  Here’s the press release:

ALASKAN WOMEN DESERVE BETTER

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

October 9, 2009

CONTACT:
Kirsten Stolle, 907-602-8042
Sara Anderson, 907-903-4121

Community to Rally Against Release of Accused Rapist Cop

CONCERNED CITIZENS TO PROTEST AT COURTHOUSE TODAY

A group of concerned citizens will gather today in front of Nesbett Courthouse to protest the limited-release of accused rapist and Anchorage Police Officer Anthony Rollins.  On October 5th, a bail hearing was held in which Judge Phillip Volland modified third party conditions to allow for electronic ankle monitoring and house arrest that included a provision to allow Rollins to still attend church while awaiting trial.

“Alaskan women deserve better than this,” said Kirsten Stolle, a concerned citizen working to organize today’s rally.  “Officer Rollins stands accused of raping six different women while on duty, and is now free to cause more pain.”

“Our state leads the nation in so many of tragic sexual abuse statistics.  It’s time for our legal system to send a strong message to perpetrators that Alaskans simply won’t stand for it.”

Officer Rollins is currently under house arrest where he is living with his wife, who is also an acting Sergeant with the Anchorage Police Department.

Today’s rally will be held in front of Nesbett Courthouse (corner of 4th and I Street) at noon.

References

1. 10/6/09. “Indicted Serial Rapist Receives Overwhelming Support by AK Muckraker (The Mudflats).
2. 10/9/09. “Anchorage Rapist Revered by Fellow Church-Goers. Is That Okay with You?” by John Aronno (Alaska Commons).
3. 10/8/09. “Welcome to October 8th, ‘D-Day’ (Dividend Day) in Alaska” by Linda Kellen Biegel (Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis).

Related posts:

1. Why I’m following the trial of alleged serial rapist Anthony Rollins
2. Anthony Rollins, accused serial rapist, found guilty on 18 of 20 charges
3. Rollins trial, day 9: State rests its case, defense calls first witnesses

Jerry Prevo on my TV. June 21 Father's Day sermon at the Anchorage Baptist Temple: lots of damning things to say about homosexuals. As usual.

I’m not sure this is it in final, but as I just told a friend, poetry is nothing if not full of variants.  (As I’m sure all the poets of the Bible full well knew.) So, call this version 1 if you like; I’ll see if there are any others.

No Questions, Questions

The man, smug in his pulpit,
has no questions.
He never has questions
except the rhetorical
question always followed
by his ready knowing answer read
from the book at his right hand:
the book at the right hand of God,
the book — the right hand of the judge
who judges the quick and the dead
to damn whoever fits
the words of his ready
answers read from that book.

I have questions…
What makes one so certain?
How does one live inside a closed book
behind closed doors in a windowless room
surrounded by a great great wall
blocking off all the horizons,
everything known, counted, familiar?
How does one live on a flat, flat Earth,
a horizonless planet where nothing new
ever walks, is seen, is encountered?
How does one breathe there?
How does one breathe where there are only
two kinds of people, the damned and the damning? —
and the smug man in his pulpit smiles,
knowing himself as the latter,
casting the former to flames,
smiling to serve such a God
who made things this way.

Somewhere beyond a horizon
on a round Earth set among stars
crafted by illimitable god,
I catch my breath.

Melissa S. Green
Tuesday, 23 June 2009
Anchorage, AK

My first brand-spanking new poem in awhile. Inspired by — hard to guess, innit? Same place, same circumstances, same ideologues — just a different year — as what drew “Sermon” out of me in 1992. Most of this was written yesterday on People Mover bus #36 during the long construction-interfered-with journey from UAA to the Loussac Library. Tip o’ the nib to James P. Carse whose The Religious Case Against Belief has been a necessary friend these past months.

Related posts:

1. Sermon (a poem)
2. Does Anyone Beat Your Heart for You (poem)
3. The Daily Tweets, 2009-10-31: "Cold" published at Crossed Genres, & other writing projects

Christianist is a term I first heard from Atlantic Monthly blogger Andrew Sullivan — a useful term that to me conveys not Christiantity as religion, but rather Christianity as political ideology.  Sullivan, who is gay, Catholic, & conservative — but not a “war of values” social conservative — does not feel any more represented by the religious right than my friend Dianne O’Connell of Immanuel Presbyterian Church does; in an essay written for Time magazine, Sullivan writes, “let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism.”

Hence, a handy term to distinguish the politics of Jerry Prevo & his followers & allies — the ideological contemporaries & descendants of the Moral Majority — from other forms of Christianity found in Alaska, the U.S., & the world.

Related posts:

1. An indictment of the Christian heresy followed by Palin & friends
2. Illimitable god, & related thoughts about why I’m not a Christian
3. The new Carrie Prejean?

The Religious Case Against Belief by James P. Carse (New York: Penguin, 2008)

Friday before last, on my way down for coffee, I spotted a book on the new books shelf of the UAA/APU Consortium Library whose title caught my interest: The Religious Case Against Belief.  Its author, James P. Carse, is a professor emeritus of religion at New York University, where he spent 30 years directing its religious studies program.

I checked it out & spent a good part of the next morning waiting for my tire changeover at Johnson Tires & fighting my muzziness (I’d been up into the early morning hours finishing my post on same-sex marriage) to read it, & actually getting a lot out of it despite my sleepiness.

Later in the day, a friend of mine came to visited my blog & made a comment on a post I’d written way back in 2006 called “The god thing.” It was interesting coincidence — or perhaps, as I said in my reply to her comment, “perhaps the intervention of Dice the spirit of luck, or so I call her in my eternally forthcoming novel Mistress of Woodland” — that my friend should find that post to comment on just when I’d found this book, which in part discusses what I was saying in that post, and in part what my friend was critical of in organized religion. As she stated:

I don’t believe in any religion on the planet. (Jim Jones and his mass murder/suicide of men, women and children Guyana in 1975 was my wake-up call.) As far as I’m concerned, if the leader has a human body/mind that person can be wrong, wrong wrong…about anything. No flipping way I’m going to follow them.

So far, I’ve found in Carse a pretty good explication of what turns both my friend & I away from organized religion.  My main difficulty (at least on the muzzy, sleep-deprived mind I had last Saturday) is that Carse uses terminology in a way that is unfamiliar to me (despite my B.A. in Religion): e.g., he uses the terms religion where I would more likely use the terms spirituality, & belief or belief system where I would more likely say organized religion or religious ideology.

But same diff.  By Carse’s light, belief system is the kind of horror we’re used to having to put up with from the hardcore “true believer” types who’d like to kill people for differing with them, & who are so hardwire-tied to their belief systems that they’d die for them.  And they do both.

It’s this kind of ideological attachment to belief systems — to religious & other putatively all-explaining ideologies, which claim to have all the answers, & to hold the blueprints of the heavens, as it were— that are responsible for most of the wars in the world. And those belief systems are not, by Carse’s light, truly religion, because true religion does not presume to hold all the answers; true religions recognizes the unknowable.  Carse is, in essence, calling for religion to toss out the belief systems — the ideologies that are the true destructive forces which lead people into violence, murder, war.

And now that I’m getting accustomed to his terminology, I’m in full agreement with him.

As I wrote in my post “The god thing” –

Any time science learns how to “explain,” answers a question, it gives rise to umpteen further question: there is no end to them because we, just tiny motes of what-god-is, can’t fit any more into our understanding than what we can fit into our thoughts, our speech, our books. As my calculus tutor used to explain, no system can contain a metasystem. No matter how much we understand, there will always be Mystery beyond that. Which is why, I think, people who are wise are also people with humility: however much they know, they are aware how very little that really is.

Somehow, for me, using that word god keeps me mindful about all that. But I don’t think one must use that word to be conscious of it.

As I wrote in my poem “Sermon” –

God cannot be enclosed in a book
or in the miser’s soul
which portions out justice in dribbles
and rations out love in crumbs,
then wonders why we starve.

I’m still reading this book. I’m finding Carse’s analysis very useful for looking at some of the bad stuff going on in the world, both in the larger world of international politics — Israel & Palestine, Iraq, the “War on Terror” — & in the world closer to home, as our local “true believers” continue to wield the weapon of their willful ignorance, willful misuse of language, & false witness to maintain an unjust status quo.

Related posts:

1. No Questions, Questions (poem)
2. The god thing
3. Illimitable god, & related thoughts about why I’m not a Christian

My own sermon is below — a poem written in December 1992 in response to the hatred & bigotry propounded by Rev. Prevo & like-minded preachers during the 1992-1993 battle inside and outside the Anchorage Assembly chambers over the same issue facing us today: whether lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transfolk in Anchorage will be afforded equal protection under the law from discrimination on the basis of a fundamental part of our fabric as human beings: our sexual orientations and gender identities.

(With thanks to Stephen Mitchell, whose translation of The Book of Job helped me to find the words.)

Sermon

I

I take as my text the Book of Job —
for are we not like him, innocent,
suffering, crying out for justice?
are we not like him, each of us
surrounded by these righteous,
these pious friends who so love us,
who console us with false accusations,
who comfort us with lies?

Hear them — Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar —
High in their pulpits they proclaim the good news:

Admit your guilt and repent your sin
the merciful Lord God will welcome you in.

What’s your complaint? you got fired from your job?
The good Lord will cast you to fires of damnation.
Your landlord has served you notice of eviction?
The Lord will evict you from heavens’s salvation.
Beat to death in the street? God signed the death warrant.
Infected with AIDS? The Almighty’s decree.
Discrimination — if it happens, which we won’t admit —
is admonishment of your culpability.
God in his compassion has served you fair warning
and if God’s indisposed, well, we’re God’s grand jury.

But admit your guilt and repent your sin
the merciful Lord God will welcome you in.

We’re a large church, but we’re a friendly church.

II

Is there anything so innocent
as the child you were at birth?
tiny and wrinkled
from between your mother’s legs
you cried — I am here! I am alive! —
such was your first yell — joy of birth!

Were you a sinner then?
Was it sin to cry for your mother’s breasts?
were you damned by your desire
for the warmth of your father’s arms?

Years grew you.
Your ears heard the lessons
of your elders who taught you
the rules to live by:
how you took them to heart.
How you chastised yourself
when you stepped out of bounds
in body, in mind.
How you took them to heart

as alone in your bed
you lay in the quiet.
You stared at your fear,
your eyes searched the night.
Your mind search your soul —

evidence — why
examination — am I
condemnation — vilify
queer — cry

— such were your tears, pressed into your pillow.
Such were your muffled sobs — grief of damnation

III

Be honest — which of you chose it?
Which of you when first you learned
you were queer — faggot! lezzie! homo! —
accepted that label with joy — celebration?

Which of you did not deny it?
Which of us did not seek to hide it?
Some hide it still — some are yet there.
Who knows silence better than we?
How we take it to heart.

Searching, seeking the root of our anguish —
how many of our sisters, our brothers
swallowed some pills, or took a mighty leap
to lie broken and crushed on the pavement?
How many of us climbed into a bottle
or crucified ourselves on a needle
or lost ourselves in an endless tangle
with the bodies of others such as we?
ecstasy! of orgasm — but after,
as we lay together side by side
in the tangle of sheets we wrestled amongst —
we wrestled alone with our dread
in the silent prisons of each heart, each head.

IV

But listen: you’ve heard of the patience of Job?
He was not so patient. Nor should we be.

How many of us looked to heaven to plead —
to shout — which of us demanded —

Yo, God!
Who’dja make the bet with this time?
Some bet. A sure thing.

Do you get your omnipotent jollies
from fate — create a creature
who by nature is unable
to adhere to your commands
without lying, without denying
what you created us to be?
I must abandon my integrity
or you abandon me?
Do you laugh to see us wriggle
with predestined misery?
Who then is righteous, who the sinner,
oh Lord God Almighty?

If this be heresy, if I blaspheme,
then teach a clear lesson, Lord God Supreme.
Cut short the suspense. Loose your thunderbolt.
Fry me where I stand and end my revolt.

Till then, this gospel I give:
curse God — and live.

V

But no — we curse not God,
but this false image of God they’ve made:
a warped, twisted abridgment

stuffed into a book, a Sunday sermon,
their cramped and distorted souls.

Can God be contracted —
compressed — compacted —
and still be God? Can you
hold in the palm of your hand
the width of the cold winter sky? Can you
forge the evening star into a ring
to adorn your little finger? Can you
play the harp of the northern lights? —
each touch of God’s fingers recolors the strings
in hues none of us has imagined.
Can you hide the summer sun
under a bushel basket? — Listen:
blind can lead blind, but the sun will still shine.

God cannot be enclosed in a book
or in the miser’s soul
which portions out justice in dribbles
and rations out love in crumbs,
then wonders why we starve.

God is too wide and vast and long
and knows us for what we are
as is known the sky, the river, the rocks,
as is knows each creature that breathes.

God is too wide, too vast, too long
and knows us as we are.

[December 29, 1992]

Related posts:

1. No Questions, Questions (poem)
2. Does Anyone Beat Your Heart for You (poem)
3. I won’t abandon my integrity, even if you abandon me

Or at least I use the word “god” — what’s that all about? This is what I wrote there.

Though I believe in god, I think the way I believe in it is pretty much on par with what many self-defined atheists & agnostics say. god (lower case g) isn’t to me some transcendent Boss of Bosses: my definition is, god = the universe & everything in it, whether we understand it or not. god is one with all that is, has been, will be, not separate or “superior” to us. We’re all just part of it. Is there an afterlife? Beats me. Will we be judged? I doubt it — except in the moment-to-moment of life when we’re judged by ourselves & each other. If justice comes from god, it comes not from some Big Guy in the Sky, but from ourselves & how we treat ourselves & one another.

I’ve got the same issues with organized religion that many atheists & agnostics do. Maybe the only difference between their fundamental perspective & mine is that they see the wonder & incredibleness of the universe & world & all that’s in it & don’t feel need to call that anything in particular, whereas I apply the name “god” to it. But with a lower-case g because god is as common as rock, as common as a molecule of oxygen, as common as anything.

Why is it that I want to use that word? What does it do for me? I guess because in part it points toward the mystery. god is common, just really the fabric of the universe, but it’s also mystery… we don’t know whether we call ourselves atheists or agnostics or Christians or Jews or Muslims or Buddhists or any of the other “ist” & “ism” names how all this works. Any time science learns how to “explain,” answers a question, it gives rise to umpteen further question: there is no end to them because we, just tiny motes of what-god-is, can’t fit any more into our understanding than what we can fit into our thoughts, our speech, our books. As my calculus tutor used to explain, no system can contain a metasystem. No matter how much we understand, there will always be Mystery beyond that. Which is why, I think, people who are wise are also people with humility: however much they know, they are aware how very little that really is.

Somehow, for me, using that word god keeps me mindful about all that. But I don’t think one must use that word to be conscious of it.

I believe that there are as many paths as there are people to follow them — whether “religious” or not. But I often find people who say being so “accepting” of other people’s different paths that they let them get away with all manner of evil. “They were only following their path.” “All perspectives are equally valid.” Bullshit.

The fundamental judgment I make of people, including myself, is not whether they follow a particular religion, or any religion at all, but whether the things they do & say cause harm. The most simple, most profound, & most succint statement of ethics & spirit that I’ve ever heard came from the neopagan movement: Harming none, do as you will. But if doing your will causes harm, then damn right I’m gonna judge you for it. And feel that your path sucks the big one. And maybe hate you for it too.

Related posts:

1. Religion v. belief
2. Illimitable god, & related thoughts about why I’m not a Christian
3. A brief spiritual history