My back hurts this morning, as it did yesterday morning, following a day spent purging books from my library. Connie and I are moving to Portland, Oregon, June 1, and one of the most expensive items you can move is books. We already have more than our shelves will bear. My desk is stacked with books--new ones bought in the last two months that I am still reading, and others I've moved to the desk because I want to refer to them when I'm writing.
The move to Portland is something we have contemplated for a long time but assumed it would be several years before we actually did it. I thought I would continue to work in New York until at least the age of 67 or so and then we would retire to Portland. As those of you who have kept up with this blog know, my work for the church has ended. It is time to be somewhere else, somewhere less intense than New York City. We love New York, to coin a phrase. Connie has lived here over twenty years, I've been here twelve (with two years for both of us in Boston along the way). But Portland offers wonders that New York lacks, particularly access to the natural beauty of the mountains and rivers of the Northwest. The Columbia River Gorge is less than two hours away, as is the Pacific Ocean in the other direction. In twenty minutes from our apartment, we can be in the western hills among cedars in the Japanese Garden (the best, most people think, outside of Japan). From our living room window, we overlook a park in the city that contains stones from Souchow, China.
The cost of living is lower in Portland, which is important to us semi-retired folk. There is great public transportation: it costs nothing to ride buses, streetcar, and rapid transit in downtown Portland. We can walk the length of the city in thirty minutes. Great restaurants, interesting indie movie theaters, the Portland Museum of Art five minutes away, an auditorium that hosts theater and performers right next door, a bistro up the street.....and by the way the rain thing is not as bad as you've heard. This last month has been rainier in NYC than in Portland.
I plan to write for the next year or so, although I am hoping to do some consulting and editorial work for publishers on a project basis. We will see if I can bring in some money writing. Connie will also be writing, finishing her next book and continuing to work on selling her previous manuscripts. We look forward to a creative, stimulating life in our new city.
For me, it feels like a new beginning in so many ways--a chance to return to the creative writing I have always done but seldom been able to focus on. There are two or three projects in the works. Last week I sent some poems to a magazine for the first time in thirty years! My web site, http://webworks.ken-arnold.com will have updates on where publications are expected, as well as work online that I hope will be stimulating and even provocative. I will be posting a new piece there in the next week.
Some of what I'm reading right now--books you might find interesting if you don't know about them:
Messenger: New and Selected Poems, by Ellen Bryant Voight. A writer of clean lines and good sense (and senses--she sees and hears so well).
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, short stories by Haruki Murakami. Murakami is presently my favorite writer. His novels are an adventure, the stories sharp and surprising.
A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine, by John K. Nelson. After my visit to Japan last summer I became more aware of the intricacies of Shinto, which lacks the institutional weight of most religions (never mind the state-sponsored Shinto of the war years--this is different.)
The Art of Setting Stones & Other Writings from the Japanese Garden, by Marc Peter Keane. Lovely prose.
Carried Away: A Selection of Stories, by Alice Munro. The new Everyman's Library collection. As good as anyone can be.
Love in a Fallen City, by Eileen Chang. Novellas and stories by a Chinese writer I'd never heard of. Touching and hard-edged, as was her life.
The Savage Detectives, a novel by Roberto Bolano. An acquired taste. He died young and this novel is a big sprawling legacy, beautiful prose and tough going.
Back on the Fire, essays by Gary Snyder. One of my favorite authors. Essays mostly about nature and the world in peril.
Next week I plan to return to my reflections on Christianity and the body, once my own body is feeling a bit better.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Talking about the Body, 2
We are all aware, I think, of the deep antagonism toward women from the early days of the church, which continues to be enshrined in our church polities, theologies, and habits of mind. Even though most churches now ordain women, with pominent and significant exceptions, there remains a lingering scent of impurity and impropriety in the presence of women on altars and in clerical garb. Women in the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church were not treated well by male colleagues (prior to the elevation of a woman to lead the church--I don't know how women are treated now). One female bishop told me as recently as last summer of outrageous dismissive behavior by her fellow male bishops. I assume that the basic attitudes of patriarchal males have not changed overnight.
Women are not highly regarded by the worldwide church in non-Western societies, and that is especially true of the worldwide Anglican Communion, which objects, along with a number of Episcopal Churches in the US, to the full inclusion of gays in the church and its leadership. I believe that the attitudes toward gays in the church are rooted in attitudes toward women. They share a common origin: an abhorrence of the body and its irrational, sensual ways.
Like women, gays are seen as impure (as I said in my previous post), not for reasons related to menstruation and pregnancy, obviously, but for reasons having to do with an upsetting of what is seen as the natural order. Order comes with reason, according to the traditional male way of thinking, and women are inherently irrational. They are unpredictable. They feel before they think. They are soft edged. They tempt men to violate their allegiance to reason and to orderly action. They tempt men to lose control (sexually and other ways).
Gays are regarded by dominant male leaders in the church in the same way. Gays are too much like women. They care more about the sensual body. They violate natural order and therefore encourage chaos. They are unpredictable because they don't think like "normal" men. They can be soft edged. They may be passive receivers of the male organ, just as women are. (Some bisexual men who engage in homosexual acts deny the are gay if they are the "active" partner. It is the receiver who is gay, ie, not male.)
What I have rehearsed, of course, is a list of stereotypes--I want to be sure you understand that I don't hold these stereotypes myself. But the church is a rational institution in its governance if not in its worship or prayer. It is ok for the masses to sing or dance or wear colorful clothes, ok for women to weep and hold one another, ok for worshipers to be "out of control"--so long as their passions are contained by organized liturgy and constrained by the rules of a rational polity. Gays are allowed in the church as part of the worshiping masses so long as they behave themselves (do not sleep with others of the same gender) and do not "act out" in ways that disrupt the natural order.
Women have been allowed more freedom in many of the denominations and are far more visible now. But they are still regarded by most male leaders as annoyances. They are always making demands, pushing against the barriers. If they team up with gays, then the male hierarchy, perhaps even the very concept of hierarchy, will be threatened. What male leaders fear most is an alliance between gays and women in the church.
It will be harder for the male elite to accept gays as they have, grudgingly, accepted women. For one thing, they are threatened by the proximity of gay males, who tempt them as women do to betray the male body, which the conservatives identify wholly with the Body of Christ.
And that's where theology meets the body in this dispute. Woman doesn't look like Christ, and that has been a sticking point for opponents of the ordination of women. But no one is even willing for a moment to make the argument that there cannot be a gay Christ--even to raise the possibility by denying it is anathema. His is the essential male body that has nothing sexually to do with women or men. His body is pure, as all bodies should be. The early church thought that women would be changed into men at the last day. Straight men.
The body we cannot get rid of is the Body of Christ, which is normative for the church.
Women are not highly regarded by the worldwide church in non-Western societies, and that is especially true of the worldwide Anglican Communion, which objects, along with a number of Episcopal Churches in the US, to the full inclusion of gays in the church and its leadership. I believe that the attitudes toward gays in the church are rooted in attitudes toward women. They share a common origin: an abhorrence of the body and its irrational, sensual ways.
Like women, gays are seen as impure (as I said in my previous post), not for reasons related to menstruation and pregnancy, obviously, but for reasons having to do with an upsetting of what is seen as the natural order. Order comes with reason, according to the traditional male way of thinking, and women are inherently irrational. They are unpredictable. They feel before they think. They are soft edged. They tempt men to violate their allegiance to reason and to orderly action. They tempt men to lose control (sexually and other ways).
Gays are regarded by dominant male leaders in the church in the same way. Gays are too much like women. They care more about the sensual body. They violate natural order and therefore encourage chaos. They are unpredictable because they don't think like "normal" men. They can be soft edged. They may be passive receivers of the male organ, just as women are. (Some bisexual men who engage in homosexual acts deny the are gay if they are the "active" partner. It is the receiver who is gay, ie, not male.)
What I have rehearsed, of course, is a list of stereotypes--I want to be sure you understand that I don't hold these stereotypes myself. But the church is a rational institution in its governance if not in its worship or prayer. It is ok for the masses to sing or dance or wear colorful clothes, ok for women to weep and hold one another, ok for worshipers to be "out of control"--so long as their passions are contained by organized liturgy and constrained by the rules of a rational polity. Gays are allowed in the church as part of the worshiping masses so long as they behave themselves (do not sleep with others of the same gender) and do not "act out" in ways that disrupt the natural order.
Women have been allowed more freedom in many of the denominations and are far more visible now. But they are still regarded by most male leaders as annoyances. They are always making demands, pushing against the barriers. If they team up with gays, then the male hierarchy, perhaps even the very concept of hierarchy, will be threatened. What male leaders fear most is an alliance between gays and women in the church.
It will be harder for the male elite to accept gays as they have, grudgingly, accepted women. For one thing, they are threatened by the proximity of gay males, who tempt them as women do to betray the male body, which the conservatives identify wholly with the Body of Christ.
And that's where theology meets the body in this dispute. Woman doesn't look like Christ, and that has been a sticking point for opponents of the ordination of women. But no one is even willing for a moment to make the argument that there cannot be a gay Christ--even to raise the possibility by denying it is anathema. His is the essential male body that has nothing sexually to do with women or men. His body is pure, as all bodies should be. The early church thought that women would be changed into men at the last day. Straight men.
The body we cannot get rid of is the Body of Christ, which is normative for the church.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Talking about the Body, 1
Well, here we are a week after the resurrection. The cold continues in the northeast. Yesterday afternoon Eighth Avenue was a flowing river because rain had been falling for twenty-four hours. It was still falling this morning. I have been thinking about the body, not only because this kind of weather makes the body feel miserable--wet clothes, chill in the bone--but because my left wrist is healing from the bicycle fall and I am feeling like a pudding for lack of excercise. I'm not allowed to ride my bike until the hand surgeon says I can.
The hand surgeon told me, as he examined my wrist, that a colleague of his, a doctor and a cyclist, had been killed a couple of months ago along the West Side Bicycle path in Manhattan--which I ride regularly, when I can ride. He was a young man who had been cycling with his wife that morning. I could tell that the doctor treating me was responding emotionally to my own accident, thinking about the unnecessary and wasteful death of his colleague. A day or two before I saw the hand surgeon, we had taken a taxi down the west side and had seen a ghostly white bicycle marking the spot where the young doctor had been killed. Beside the bicycle was an artifical wooden flower, colorful. The kind of thing that makes one think of Easter and resurrection.
The doctor's body is gone, as all bodies will go. Jesus' body goes too. In Christian theology we talk about the resurrection of the body. We read in scripture that we will all be changed, and we think of a new body. Thomas touches the wound. The body matters to all of us; it matters particularly in Christian story and ritual. There is a wonderfully weird painting by Caravaggio of Thomas with his finger stuck in the slit in Jesus' side: it is patently sexual, the slit vaginal. Not so long ago, a group of us were looking at it during a meeting, discussing the painting as if it had nothing to do with sexuality, as if the finger were just a finger, ignoring altogether the other message of the work: we are sexual beings, even in our relationship to God. It is a blatently homoerotic work. Take another look at some of the Medieval and Renassiance paintings that emphasize the private parts of the naked Jesus, the suckling babe, images that today might close down a museum.
The church's vexed relationship with the human body, and particularly the female body, is not news. In a recent communication to someone who had read one of my earlier posts here, I said that I thought we need a theology of the body that is up to date, that takes account of how our thinking about what the body signifies has changed. The church is stuck with a very old paradigm in which we celebrate resurrection but deplore the body.
The lack of a coherent theology of the body is part of the problem the church has with homosexuality (or almost any sexuality)--and part of the problem it has with women. Even though the Episcopal Church ordains women, and has for thirty years, the female body is still a problem for the church. So is the male body (hence the problem with homosexuality). At the ordination/consecration of Gene Robinson in New Hampshire, a priest spoke against the action and began to detail the (as he was clearly suggesting, "disgusting") things males did with each other, particularly the parts they touched, as if simply saying the parts--anus, penis, testicles--were themselves sufficient evidence of the horror of the acts involving them.
Part of the problem is the somewhat hidden but very strong sense that Christianity remains a purity religion (as all religions are or have been). The purity of the altar is the primary way in which we encounter this ancient strain of Christian sensibility in the liturgical churches. Only the ordained handle the sacred elements or control how the rest will handle them. But in general Christians sense that the doings of the body are and should remain beyond the concern of the church. Nonetheless, what we do with each other sexuality should be governed by the church in order to preserve the purity of the community. You don't know what that hand has touched! Only what is blessed or sanctified (through marriage) may be touched. All else is impure and may not approach the altar. Ditto for the thrice-married priest or bishop.
The split in the Anglican Communion is to a great extent about purity. One must repent and stop touching impure things to be part of the community. In the United States, the majority of the members of the Episcopal Church are willing to accept gays without imposing purity requirements on them, but at the same time, I suspect that most of those who accept gays and divorce and the routine habits of cohabitation by the unmarried continue in some part of their hearts to suspect that the church is less pure than it used to be. There may even be a lingering suspicion that the impure shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. Shifted from the realm of sexuality, this suspicion gets channeled into other aspects of church life. For example, the pure don't move around much or sing songs with rhythm or dance in church. The pure, the clergy, wear clothing that hides their bodies. And so perhaps should the rest of us. Dirty homeless people being are an offense because we can smell them, even after they've gone.
During this Eastern season, when we read of or experience Jesus walking around in his body (or in some body, even ours), it would be helpful to clarify what we mean when we speak of the body we are in, the Body of Christ we ingest, the body we really hate to think of losing to death.
The hand surgeon told me, as he examined my wrist, that a colleague of his, a doctor and a cyclist, had been killed a couple of months ago along the West Side Bicycle path in Manhattan--which I ride regularly, when I can ride. He was a young man who had been cycling with his wife that morning. I could tell that the doctor treating me was responding emotionally to my own accident, thinking about the unnecessary and wasteful death of his colleague. A day or two before I saw the hand surgeon, we had taken a taxi down the west side and had seen a ghostly white bicycle marking the spot where the young doctor had been killed. Beside the bicycle was an artifical wooden flower, colorful. The kind of thing that makes one think of Easter and resurrection.
The doctor's body is gone, as all bodies will go. Jesus' body goes too. In Christian theology we talk about the resurrection of the body. We read in scripture that we will all be changed, and we think of a new body. Thomas touches the wound. The body matters to all of us; it matters particularly in Christian story and ritual. There is a wonderfully weird painting by Caravaggio of Thomas with his finger stuck in the slit in Jesus' side: it is patently sexual, the slit vaginal. Not so long ago, a group of us were looking at it during a meeting, discussing the painting as if it had nothing to do with sexuality, as if the finger were just a finger, ignoring altogether the other message of the work: we are sexual beings, even in our relationship to God. It is a blatently homoerotic work. Take another look at some of the Medieval and Renassiance paintings that emphasize the private parts of the naked Jesus, the suckling babe, images that today might close down a museum.
The church's vexed relationship with the human body, and particularly the female body, is not news. In a recent communication to someone who had read one of my earlier posts here, I said that I thought we need a theology of the body that is up to date, that takes account of how our thinking about what the body signifies has changed. The church is stuck with a very old paradigm in which we celebrate resurrection but deplore the body.
The lack of a coherent theology of the body is part of the problem the church has with homosexuality (or almost any sexuality)--and part of the problem it has with women. Even though the Episcopal Church ordains women, and has for thirty years, the female body is still a problem for the church. So is the male body (hence the problem with homosexuality). At the ordination/consecration of Gene Robinson in New Hampshire, a priest spoke against the action and began to detail the (as he was clearly suggesting, "disgusting") things males did with each other, particularly the parts they touched, as if simply saying the parts--anus, penis, testicles--were themselves sufficient evidence of the horror of the acts involving them.
Part of the problem is the somewhat hidden but very strong sense that Christianity remains a purity religion (as all religions are or have been). The purity of the altar is the primary way in which we encounter this ancient strain of Christian sensibility in the liturgical churches. Only the ordained handle the sacred elements or control how the rest will handle them. But in general Christians sense that the doings of the body are and should remain beyond the concern of the church. Nonetheless, what we do with each other sexuality should be governed by the church in order to preserve the purity of the community. You don't know what that hand has touched! Only what is blessed or sanctified (through marriage) may be touched. All else is impure and may not approach the altar. Ditto for the thrice-married priest or bishop.
The split in the Anglican Communion is to a great extent about purity. One must repent and stop touching impure things to be part of the community. In the United States, the majority of the members of the Episcopal Church are willing to accept gays without imposing purity requirements on them, but at the same time, I suspect that most of those who accept gays and divorce and the routine habits of cohabitation by the unmarried continue in some part of their hearts to suspect that the church is less pure than it used to be. There may even be a lingering suspicion that the impure shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. Shifted from the realm of sexuality, this suspicion gets channeled into other aspects of church life. For example, the pure don't move around much or sing songs with rhythm or dance in church. The pure, the clergy, wear clothing that hides their bodies. And so perhaps should the rest of us. Dirty homeless people being are an offense because we can smell them, even after they've gone.
During this Eastern season, when we read of or experience Jesus walking around in his body (or in some body, even ours), it would be helpful to clarify what we mean when we speak of the body we are in, the Body of Christ we ingest, the body we really hate to think of losing to death.
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Falling, Not Jumping
I don't remember falling. I remember the moment before, when my bicycle tire caught in the streetcar track on Portland, Oregon's Northrup Street. I was heading up to the hills north of the city along the Willamette River. A fine mist was falling and I was looking forward to the hazy views. When the front tire slid into the track I knew I was going to fall. When I woke up, there were four people hovering over me, one of them holding a cloth to my bleeding forehead. Another assured me I was ok. These were passersby who had removed me from the steetcar tracks and called the fire department, which soon arrived (Engine Company 9, I later learned) with an EMS truck and crew. I could not remember the name of my hotel, nor its address. I think I remembered my name. Fortunately, I had ID, my health insurance card, my wife's cell phone number. The rental bike was not damaged, and the firemen said they'd return it for me. Really? They could hear the New York skepticism in my voice. But I was in no position to argue, strapped tight to a gurney. They were concerned about my neck and a likely concussion.
I did have--do have--a concussion, also a broken bone in my wrist and over my eye. Seven stitches removed yesterday back here in NY. My left arm is in a cast, and my head still hurts. We loved Portland anyway.
Hard to type with a cast. I'll be brief.
This morning, Palm Sunday, I heard sirens, not unusual in NYC, but they were close. I looked out and saw a man standing on the New York Inn sign five floors above 8th Avenue. Two dozen police officers in the street, one on a fire escape trying to talk him down. The man had his hands in his pockets, leaning against the hotel's brick wall, too far from the officer to be touched, but he kept looking over at the policeman talking to him, trying to talk him down. He was listening. Other officers arrived on the roof. One on the next-door building straddled a ledge, held by a safety rope. The avenue full of flashing lights, everyone just watching. Tense. The man stepped out on the sign, balanced above the sidewalk. I thought, he's going and prayed he wouldn't. But he stepped and leaned back, slumped in his clothes as if defeated. Soon, he sat and the officer on the next-door building helped him down.
When the policeman who had been talking to him from the fire escape for an hour came out onto the avenue, the other officers cheered and congratulated him. One of those New York moments.
As I made coffee, I was thinking about how much energy we are willing to dedicate to rescuing, caring for, strangers, myself in Portland, this unknown man who wanted to end his life. What do we do, now that we have been rescued?
I did have--do have--a concussion, also a broken bone in my wrist and over my eye. Seven stitches removed yesterday back here in NY. My left arm is in a cast, and my head still hurts. We loved Portland anyway.
Hard to type with a cast. I'll be brief.
This morning, Palm Sunday, I heard sirens, not unusual in NYC, but they were close. I looked out and saw a man standing on the New York Inn sign five floors above 8th Avenue. Two dozen police officers in the street, one on a fire escape trying to talk him down. The man had his hands in his pockets, leaning against the hotel's brick wall, too far from the officer to be touched, but he kept looking over at the policeman talking to him, trying to talk him down. He was listening. Other officers arrived on the roof. One on the next-door building straddled a ledge, held by a safety rope. The avenue full of flashing lights, everyone just watching. Tense. The man stepped out on the sign, balanced above the sidewalk. I thought, he's going and prayed he wouldn't. But he stepped and leaned back, slumped in his clothes as if defeated. Soon, he sat and the officer on the next-door building helped him down.
When the policeman who had been talking to him from the fire escape for an hour came out onto the avenue, the other officers cheered and congratulated him. One of those New York moments.
As I made coffee, I was thinking about how much energy we are willing to dedicate to rescuing, caring for, strangers, myself in Portland, this unknown man who wanted to end his life. What do we do, now that we have been rescued?
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