If a perfect concentric circle comprised of Pilgrim’s Progress and the David Bowie-famous 1986 film Labyrinth sounds exhilarating, *boy* do I have a book for you.

I’ve been intending to read Lilith—that most exalted of literary Christian acid trips—for years. Long an Inkling & Inkling-maker devotee, by the time I finally got around to it this summer, I felt certain I was ready. (Lol: NOPE) My deferrals are largely related to the story’s material lying (spiritually) too close to the bone. You probably already know, but if you don’t: George Macdonald managed to become one of the most beloved heretics of all time. By this, I mean that he is read, touted, recommended and drooled over *well within* the confines of the orthodoxy from which he departed. Macdonald is a famous proponent of universalism, a heresy over which I salivate, and of which I am currently in camp Hopeful—perhaps more. The foremost traditional critique of Christian universalism is that it is—please permit me—an eschatological twinkie, a sugary copout that makes nonsense of the cross. More seriously, it could be considered fatally unloving to sound no alarm if the house is well and truly on fire. (Aka if the soul risks a real downward drop in coming Christless to the cusp of eternity) The stakes are high, brotato.

In any case, Lilith is one of the clearest and most fully articulated manifestations of GM’s theological imagination. It’s an allegory occupied chiefly with the slow (think millennia beyond reckoning) and not infrequently agonizing regeneration of the soul. (And body!! In this cosmos, you—assuming you are super shitty and godless—dwindle down to mere skeleton, and from thence—per your recognition of & cooperation with Love—regain immortal flesh one tiny cell at a time, ultimately attaining full reunification with God. *This* is Macdonald’s universalism. Gnarly right?!) But here’s what I was not prepared for:

Minds like Macdonald’s—with their beauty, their complexity, their mysticism and devotion—open the eyes in ways they are not quite used to opening, and in doing so make portals (how deeply appropriate this is) to other realms. No thing animate or inanimate in the world of Lilith is *merely* a thing. This spiritual and semantic density has me suddenly encountering my own world anew. (And freaking out lollll) In the book, all created objects, even the meagerest, possess inner life and inward thought. Inversions and symbolic layerings abound. Prayers are flowers. Flowers are prayers. People are animals. Consider this exchange between the protagonist, Mr Vale, and his guide—

‘….I took you for a raven,” I said--seeing him before me as plainly a raven as bird or man could look.

“You did me no wrong,” he returned. “Calling me a raven, or thinking me one, you allowed me existence, which is the sum of what one can demand of his fellow-beings. Therefore, in return, I will give you a lesson: No one can say he is himself, until first he knows that he is, and then what himself is. In fact, nobody is himself, and himself is nobody. There is more in it than you can see now, but not more than you need to see. You have, I fear, got into this region too soon, but none the less you must get to be at home in it; for home, as you may or may not know, is the only place where you can go out and in. There are places you can go into, and places you can go out of; but the one place, if you do but find it, where you may go out and in both, is home.”

He turned to walk away, and again I saw the librarian. He did not appear to have changed, only to have taken up his shadow. I know this seems nonsense, but I cannot help it.’

And then come the constant conflations of death with life and life with death. Or rather, Death with Life and Life with Death. These became so dizzying and vertiginous after a while I stopped working to make sense of them; and anyway, they almost always seemed to make an eerie intuitive sense of their own. For a taste:

You wish to die because you do not care to live: for no one can die who does not long to live.”

‘and you will be dead, so long as you refuse to die

“Now I knew that life and truth were one; that life mere and pure is in itself bliss; that where being is not bliss, it is not life, but life-in-death.”

When a heart is really alive, then it is able to think live things.

Our titular villainess presides, of course, in macabre and ancient magnificence. She has fouled her peerless fairness into rot after the common fashion, choosing basic sinister shit and self-serving vainglory (and like murder and vampirism lol) so relentlessly that her hand—because of a stolen object enclosed therein—has hardened into a non-functioning claw. We do witness Lilith’s redemption. (Or at least its beginning, which is also its emotional climax) It is long and brutal because—and this fascinated me utterly—it had to be *chosen.* Free will and determinism dance a mesmerizing tango in MacDonald’s theology; so strange and beautiful and unlike other familiar ballroom traipsing I yearned to know and memorize each step.

Lilith is presented largely in accordance with the general Lilith mythos—triple thiccc hottie, whole-ass personification of fallen womanhood. She is urged to repent (over and over and over) and remains (over and over and over) defiant until at last she is compelled (by God) to see herself as she truly is, or what she has let herself become. This frightful spectacle turbo-charges a penitence that will come slowly to fruition as Lilith—you guessed it—dies into eternal life, into an eventual final rising at the true dawn of the universe, yadda yadda.

The pathos of this book—its spiritual and emotional arc—was frequently so overwhelming, I couldn’t read for more than a few minutes or pages without a desperate desire to put my attention elsewhere (on something less relentlessly cosmic and elevated) Macdonald’s understanding of how we make ourselves more human—and less human—rattled me. I had a hideous epiphany that I’m far more human on a twenty minute walk than I am *at any given second* anywhere online. When I walk, I become suddenly and singularly unselfconscious—my gaze and being are together fixed outward, expanding to take in the beauty of the world in a way that involves—but never refers to or centers—me. I began to wonder how much I’ve diminished my humanity on social media, which compels me to incessantly think about and project myself (or a curated persona) outward for others to witness or consume. I spend probably several hours or more a day (taken collectively) on social media, and rarely more than an hour outside walking. I’m not especially good at math, but these numbers don’t seem to give my soul a sunny sum. Goddammit George. (Literally?!?!?! Figuratively?!!?) Or is it Godredeemit???? (Sry)

I’ll end with something I can’t explain. The night I finished Lilith, my four year old woke in the small hours. He can’t read, and I’ve not mentioned this book or its contents so much as once in his presence. Toward the end of the story, the protagonist travels back through a secret passage into paradise, finding immense lakes and rivers where Lilith’s desert wastes had lately been.

Heath sleep talks a lot, often incoherently. But he said to me (it’s going to sound like I’m lying: I’m not) verbatim: ‘in paradise, look for the secret passage. by the lake’

I’m not woo-woo enough to have read much about transference, but I was so spooked and stupefied by this event *I decided not to think more or make more of it*

Read this book if you want to stir your soul into a mighty, unknowable froth.

Here is the passage I liked best, of many. It is from the beginning, rather than the end. (But perhaps, after all, the end is only the beginning…)

“Could you not teach me to know a prayer-flower when I see it?” I said.

“I could not. But if I could, what better would you be? you would not know it of YOURSELF and ITself! Why know the name of a thing when the thing itself you do not know? Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes? But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool of you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise!”

But I did see that the flower was different from any flower I had ever seen before; therefore I knew that I must be seeing a shadow of the prayer in it; and a great awe came over me to think of the heart listening to the flower.

Before I made a post about Malcolm Guite & further reading in contemporary Christian poetics that went (micro) viral (5000 views instead of my usual hundred & I’m counting both my parents in that hundred) and gave at least 3 middle-aged male WASPs v inexplicably bunched knickers, (ok my working explanation is that such men find denim-clad women with critical thinking skills unpalatable, what with preferring the classic apron/lobotomy pairing) where were we? Ah, yes:

as it turns out, exceptionalism of any kind can be a real (b)

itch. Allow me to emphasize on behalf of all nerdy girls that by ‘exceptionalism,’ I mean a kind of involuntary nonconformance, not a kind of superiority. Different is, in this case, neither better nor worse: different is simply different.

This series isn’t “Dear Cool Girl.” (Though that would be dope, and someone authentically cool and wizened should 100% take it on for the Regina George protegees among us) Cool requires by default a standard-bearing normativity—an effortlessness—and not infrequently, a particular kind of ease and detachment that’s simply not the terrain, Nerdy Girl, you likely find yourself traversing. Cool girl is chill girl. How chill are you, Nerdy Girl? I’m guessing you’re about as chill as Chappel Roan’s Coachella Pink Pony Club encore no 3 (lol I’ve never been to Coachella)

That is because—if you’ll allow me to make use of a supremely helpful colloquialism—you are (beg pardon) blood-curdlingly cringe.

It would’ve gone a long way for my self-understanding if this word existed in the modern sense in like, 2005, but I digress.

When peers witness, say, your titanic zeal for Louisa May Alcott’s obscure but unbelievably exhilarating Long Fatal Love Chase, they typically experience profound second-hand embarrassment. When they experience your awareness of their embarrassment and, worse yet, your attempts to mitigate this embarrassment, the cringe levels become stratospheric.

So here’s my very wild, super unusual and highly astonishing theory—

Total self-acceptance is the best weapon in your game-of-life arsenal. It’s also the most difficult to acquire. But instead of alienating yourself from yourself by trying (vainly) to appreciate the various refinements (LET ME JUST ANTIQUATE MYSELF) of Laguna Beach’s Kristin Cavallari or shouldering your way through the pungent blackness of Hollister, (LOL) suck it up and accept that you feel things deeply and that everyone sees it, that you love tf out of The Count of Monte Cristo, that you have an untaught/unteachable obsession with language, and—critically—that you completely stymy the average high school boy, which feels & seems bad (spoiler: it’s actually so so good.)

Do not waste time developing coping mechanisms for being terminally nerdy. It sounds almost unbearably simple to say ‘be who you are without apology’ – but it will always merit repeating, since the simplest truths can be the hardest truths to inhabit.

To this day, *in these very epistles* I am needlessly mouthy and crass. Why? Because getting ahead of my full-heartedness/off-putting literary loftiness by projecting street-smart cheek was one of mine: now I drag it around like a ball and chain. (Tbf it can also be fun, but blending the Aristocrat and the Clown is deadass weird as hell)

Also, Nerdy Girl: high school is really, really, really not it. Anyone for whom high school was it needs your relational investment and possibly your prayers. You’ll come out of that (endearing but kind of shitty) incubator, and it’s possible that your departure from the incubator will coincide with well-timed foil highlights that make all the boys who couldn’t fathom you suddenly desperate to…fathom you…overnight. Nerdy Girl, stay unfathomable.

(But have all the sex you want.)

(Jk)

(Mostly)

Let us close with some authentically timeless and thoroughly nerdy wisdom:

“Surely she had never asked God for anything except that He should let her have her will. And every time she had been granted what she asked for—for the most part. Now here she sat with a contrite heart—not because she had sinned against God but because she was unhappy that she had been allowed to follow her will to the road’s end.” (Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter)

“..for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” (George Eliot, Middlemarch)

“She was of the stuff of which great men’s mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.” (Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd)

Let me own that in the abstract, detached realm of theory, telling people about Jesus and serving as his hands and feet are not mutually exclusive pursuits. But let me also say that in our deeply attached—fallen, broken, embodied, ‘not yet’ part of Christ’s ‘already’…I’ve come to think that—most of the time, if not quite always—they are.

Why so? Because ‘….thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere,’ and ‘go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ became, for a significant portion of global Christian history, templates for forced conversion, cultural obliteration, and *literal* massacre. This fact alone should raise bile in the back of our throats.

Luckily, even the most zealous (I’m going to skip the socio-politically saturated & broad term ‘evangelicals’ in favor of the narrower, more specifically functional ‘evangelists’) – lament this violence today. Unluckily, many of them nevertheless spend time, gifts and energy on conversion metrics focusing the Christian conversation on teaching others about Jesus in a way that’s very frequently reduced to:

a) a fear-mongering risk/reward roundtable: ‘turn or burn/do you know where you’re going when you die’

b) unbearably patronizing bestowal: ‘I will now impart unto you, foolish heathen, my wisdom’

c) shitty instant coffee: ‘pray this sorry/thank you/please & raise your hand when I make an altar call so I can announce that I led 300 people to Christ today’

Feels like a good time for some quick caveats:

I don’t think doing evangelism is *always* harmful. This isn’t meant to be that kind of diss track. But when the cumulative result of enterprising Christianity’s collective history is weighed, it’s generally done (it seems to me) either more harm than good, or as much harm as good. I also think that *if the world had zero missionaries or evangelists whose only agenda was conversion,* the kingdom of God—specifically the number of bodies in it—would be unchanged. When and why did we begin to imagine that cooperating with God in carrying (embodying) Christ’s aroma involves, largely, *announcing* that we’re reliable carriers, and that you should be, too?

It’s not that I don’t believe in any Christian conversion whatsoever. Don’t get it twisted.

“Be the change you wish to see in the world” is attributed—shakily, and probably falsely—to Mahatma Ghandi. My philosophy of conversion after leaving traditional evangelism behind is simply “be the Christ you wish to see in the world.” (Spoiler: it’s totally impossible, but in a good way) – also, I am at peace: the Word became flesh and pitched His tent, dwelt, dwells.

Here’s the thing. I’ve been in spaces (in point of fact, I spent a deeply formative three years completely ensconced) with prominent evangelists (by ‘prominent,’ I mean it’s like their whole thing and they’re globally recognized) and witnessed first-hand how the air gets sucked out of the room when the words ‘but why don’t Christians look more like Christ?’ are inevitably uttered. Why indeed. (And the finger we must point should aim directly and always at the self)

It’s really great for me, also, to be absolved of perpetuating the following fusterclucks: (TW, *Christianese*)

a) Jesus loves you inconceivably but also you’re going to hell if you don’t love him back but also he’d never make you love him back but also if you go to hell (insert CS Lewis) you chose it

b) (insert more CS Lewis) God doesn’t send anyone to hell (thy will be done//THY will be done CS LEWIS) but also awkwardly Divine Hiddenness but also if God was too obvious then you couldn’t actually choose Him because obviousness would make him fairly mandatory but also Hell for you if you don’t do the very bizarre trapeze walk called God is exactly obvious enough for you to freely choose

c) unreached people groups (WAIT WE HAVE CS LEWIS FOR THIS blah blah the last battle & pagan services technically rendered to Aslan etc etc)

d) holding forth on a laundry list of (openly debated) ‘certitudes’ deduced from one tradition’s interpretation of scripture. I’ve made room for mild to moderate heterodoxy—this was the most liberating expansion of my life. My one ongoing certitude (and the reason you can’t cancel my Christian card even though some of you might want to) is this: Christ physically came into the groaning world He made, saved and redeemed it on the cross, bodily rose from the grave, and ascended to his Father. His risen body means I will have a risen body in the new creation. It means—to paraphrase a Tolkien passage most precious to me—‘everything sad is going to come untrue.’ Not in a cute, sentimental way. In an eternal cosmic victory way.

I have let everything else—including big stuff for Christians, like how to be a correctly sexual being, for example—go. This letting go does NOT equal ‘now these things don’t matter.’ It equals, rather, a release from the hubris of imposition in favor of mystery and humility. Not unmoored, floaty mystery with no tether. Christ is the tether. What do I mean? I mean He places certain limits and demands on my life; namely—there are two commandments on which the Law and prophets hang. They relate to how *I myself* inhabit the world—how I respond to you, reader, and to God. Let me evangelize you with my life, and make you desperate to meet the One in whom I live and move and have my being. Inviting you to a dinner party with champagne and 6 course meal >>>>>> inviting you to my bible study, giving a three point talk, holding signs on the street, whatever.

Evangelism was the worst boyfriend I ever had. I was told by serious evangelists that if Christianity is true, it will stand up to intense scrutiny. I think they’re right about this. What didn’t withstand scrutiny was the common evangelical method.

If you’re there, I’m not saying you’re in a toxic relationship you need to get out of, per se. I am saying my world was ablur with red flags, and that it’s utterly exhausting to believe the majority of humanity is vaguely condemned, one’s bit in the greater work of salvation being to broadcast this tragic fact.

6 course meal > 3 point talk. Me exemplifying the compassion/grace/wisdom of Christ > me explaining why you need ‘a relationship with him.’

‘The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’

Listen: I really do get it. And—as a devoted(ish) OG M.G. stan of nigh on a decade—I’m happy to confirm the hobbitiest poet-priest to ever walk upon England’s mountains green does largely live up to the hype; not only as a poet, but as a public intellectual inhabiting the vast intersectional landscape of Theopoetics.

But we (ok maybe not we, but I 🤣) have a problem. BIG CHRISTIANITY (think big Pharma but make it Jesus) is ruining Malcolm Guite. Or—ok, some things are just undefilable—they’re soaking him and his writing in the unwieldy, mercurial waters of celebrity.

Of course, vaulting Guite to the platform he presently commands (and he didn’t get there overnight) is not necessarily bad in & of itself. Every culture and subculture has (and needs!) high profile figures, and Guite can be viewed among these as an honorable example that did not seek, but is largely worthy of, his fame. If by chance you’ve been living under a rock and this is the first time you’ve heard the name, 30 seconds rummaging on or or will tell you everything you need to know, plus plus. And yes: go read his books.

Now. There are two types of people in the world: people who love reading, and people who say they love reading when what they actually mean is that they love reading the Inklings to the exclusion of all other literature on the planet. Before you dismiss me for a hater, I can assure you you want me on your trivia team when the table’s asked to name the Two Trees of Valinor eventually drained by Shelob’s ancestor Ungoliant during Melkor’s fatal assault…you get the idea. I throw up jazz hands for the Inklings with the best of them, have supped half a dozen times at The Kilns and not as tourist—that is to say, please know these authors and their works are with me always.

Here’s my point—there are hidden riches among us that deserve more time at the surface. If we never push the scope of our reading beyond the prescribed/beaten tracks, we risk leaving a lot of precious gems in the ground. So without further ado, (actually probz a little more ado…but not much 🙃) allow me to introduce five authors and books of poetry that you should order by the time you finish reading this article. Trust me: if Malcolm Guite is for you, they are too. It is my customarily violent opinion that—at the level of poetry, anyway—some of these people run circles around our fond Merlin-esque hero. And yes, I have preordered my copy of Galahad and the Grail

GO YE AND READ:

1. Edward Clarke’s Cherubims

   (from Kelsay’s bio) Edward Clarke was born on the edge of the Forest of Dean in 1975. After attending schools in Lydney, Buenos Aires, and Monmouth, he studied English Language and Literature at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and then undertook a PhD on Wallace Stevens at Trinity College, Dublin. He now lives in Oxford with his Italian wife and two sons, teaching English literature and art history at various colleges and the Department for Continuing Education at Oxford University.

**I took a poetry class with Dr Clarke in a dingy continuing ed dept room in Summerville that truly changed the course of my life. I believe he’s one of our finest living poets, and anyone with a penchant for neoformalism is in for a cornucopia of delights with this or any of his books—all of which are saturated with the concerns of God’s kingdom.

2. ’s The Elegy Beta

   Mischa is the kind of MFA advisor every ambitious student hopes for, (critical, supportive, attentive) which is why it’s so fantastic for posterity that he’s now running a brand new show called Whitworth University’s MFA in Creative Writing. (Writers of faith, this one’s for you.) Mischa’s poetry is every bit as luminous as his teaching, and admirers of Rilke would do well to fall deep into the pages of EB and remain therein for a good long time. There’s more where that came from, too—Mischa’s latest collection will be with us this fall!)

3. Olga Sedakova’s Old Songs

   Wunderkid Rowan Williams via the fine folks at : “Olga Sedakova is a writer of global significance. . .the publishing of this collection is a welcome stage in the reception of her exceptional genius in the West.”

**this wonderful book was translated by Martha M.F. Kelly. If you’re a badass Christian woman wanting to read and support other badass Christian women, kindly ‘add to cart.’

4. Bruce Beasley’s Prayershreds

   I’m not just hyping a fellow Orison Books press-mate, here—Beasley’s pyrotechnics with language are unlike, I can assure you, anything you’ve ever read, and the gospel is their beating heart. Push yourself to reach the high bar of entry to these poems—they reward lovers of the word and the Word rather lavishly.

5. Micheal O'Siadhail’s Five Quintets

   If you can afford to spend thirty bucks on a book, it should be this one. Fan of Dante, perhaps? Let me tantalize you:

   “Celebrated Irish poet Micheal O’Siadhail structures his Quintets to echo the Comedy. Where Dante had a tripartite structure ( Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso), O’Siadhail has a five-part structure, with each quintet devoted to a discipline--the arts; economics; politics; science; and philosophy and theology. Each quintet is also marked by a different form: sonnets interspersed by haikus ("saikus"), iambic pentameter, terza rima, and two other invented forms.”

   Hell yeah.

If it helps, I think Malcolm would want you to read these—each an ace of spades in its own right—too. So if you’re re-reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader for the 28th time, perhaps consider a fresh addition. (You get a pass from me if its Till We Have Faces…lol)

happy reading, friends.

H

lol.

Seriously, though, the very traits that may isolate you now are likely same the attributes that’ll allow you to catch the right updraft and fly (defy gravity?? 🙃) at a later stage of development. I need you to know this because at your age especially, oddness is lonely, and because (buckle up for this ground-breaking revelation) a love letter to you is a love letter to my younger self.

When asked in a recent interview about the secret to her success, SNL star/actress & overall BAMF Kate McKinnon replied, “I’ve just been profoundly weird my whole life.” https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0k03mmb

Obviously everyone has idiosyncrasies, and there’s no substitute (alas the fcking day) for classic personal odyssey ingredients like hard/deliberate work, resilience, courage, yadda yadda. But I promise, if you walk steadily and intentionally in the direction of whatever your blood burns for—assuming you’re not a vampire or drug addict—you are on the right walk, and some version of the attic-scribbling Jo to weekly Volcano Press Jo transformation is waiting. If you’re confused by that reference, I cannot actually emphasize the extent to which this is not your letter.

Trust me, I know. I thought of myself as a late-bloomer for years. It turns out I was just a timely bloomer, and that being fingered by your linebacker lab partner in the back of a Chevy Impala at 14 15 16 is not quite the grand, enviable rite of passage it once seemed to me after Tiffani H’s vivid, anatomical description.

Certainly before (and possibly right up through) senior year, I was bookish, loud, and strange, with—this is important—zero hot-girl currency (I really just looked like a kid) to leverage against these maladies: fundamentally undesirable, it seemed to me then. I mean, I spoke like I’m speaking right now. Brock from Spanish II def wasn’t into it. You get the idea. (I can’t remember if B passed the class, but he was really excited about the word ‘puta’)

So many girls around me were becoming women…or of course, as I see it now, not women, but suddenly possessed of bodies and lifestyles that would suggest adulthood, many of them failed by systems and caregivers and poverty cycles that ultimately manifested no higher education, baby-daddies, (the kind you really don’t want) and substance abuse struggles. Girls like this need our help. Our resources, our support, our conscientious voting body. But I digress.

In 2007, I would’ve given anything to be getting Busch Light white-girl wasted in an asparagus field with the best of them. (This ephemeral dream was regularly actualized by 2010, but there’s truly a *world* of difference between a girl of 17 and a girl of 20) Even if I hadn’t had vigilant parents, I would’ve struggled to get an invite. My inner atmosphere was so dominated by the idea that I was behind, missing out, and ultimately doomed to a spinsterhood imposed by some fatal combination of my personality, wardrobe, and irrepressible urge to bring up the Kinslaying at Alqualondë wrought by the hubris of Fëanor. Sound familiar? I thought it might. Nerdy girl, I have good news for you.

• Dear ones! I will be opening and closing my day with the book of Psalms to see what and how these ancient holy words work in me.

• I’ll be doing it strangely, using an idea that dropped as a feather from the sky (though I can’t imagine I’m the first one to think of this) — I’ll read from the beginning in the morning, (this morning was Psalm 1) and from the end at night (tonight, 150) — and so on, until I close with two Psalms that live right next to each other in the middle, in a venture I’m calling “reading to the center”

If anyone else would like to join me in this reading venture, casually or formally, I’d be so delighted. It seems a generative spiritual and writerly journey—I’ve never read the Psalms in sequence, and I do believe it’s high Spring and high time.

Be blessed

H

God doesn’t want us to be “happy.” Or more specifically, He’s not particularly fussed about human happiness one way or the other, because His true concern for the flowering Christian heart is joy, which is altogether different from and superior to (and literally transcendent beyond) happiness.

You’ve heard it, right? TBF, it is a wonderful and correct wet blanket to throw on the toxic flames of American prosperity gospel.

And actually, I think the undergirding idea that God has no interest in coddling us, catering to our various comforts and behaving like some sort of ultimate cosmic genie is right on the money. To the extent the words ‘God doesn’t care about your happiness’ conveys this, I’m fully on board.

But lately, I’ve been wondering if the Christian community has sometimes taken too low a view of happiness, reducing it to material experience enmeshed with personal plenteousness and linked chiefly to wealth. In other words, making the pursuit of happiness—codified in that intensely divisive and oft-cited document, the Declaration of Independence—synonymous with the pursuit of money (ew)

Is there a world in which (a leading question: I’m hella thinking the answer could be YES) ‘happiness’ means instead the deeply anchored contentment of the soul, the kind of anchoring enabled by alignment with the Holy Spirit and vast relational wealth?

There is a studied and documented phenomenon among the happiest people on earth. Let me spoil it for you: they sustain a variety of deep and lasting personal relationships. This drowns out (in the sense that it is overwhelmingly the most critical ‘happiness’ ingredient) a chorus of other key traits shared by happy people (health/exercise, mindset, meaningful work/sense of purpose etc—these show up in the data too)

Consider a person—we’ll thicken the pot, think of a Christian—in your life who might be truthfully called profoundly unhappy. Ask yourself whether this person, despite their profound unhappiness, meaningfully possesses ‘joy’ in the midst of it? Even if this is true in the rare, strange case—certainly it’s the exception, not the rule.

Is anyone else tired of hearing that God cbf’ed[1] about our happiness? Even if the message is more useful and meaningful when unpacked to the fullest extent, (I just heard Rowan Williams—HERO among common men—do it fairly painlessly in an interview, but I still found myself rolling my eyes!!) I wonder what it would do for us to imagine not only that He longs for us to have the (good) desires of our hearts, but that He cares intensely and personally about human happiness. I wonder if—when this word is finally allowed to have a charitable interpretation—it’s very akin to, if not fully synonymous with, joy.

Of course I understand that (one example) people of faith dealing with terminal illness are able to retain a profound undercurrent of joy despite facing the acute physical unhappiness related to being sick. The same might be said of those facing the anguish of loss—despite the loud, constant presence of unhappiness, there is a bedrock of—might we even say the assurance of future joy or restoration???—beneath it.

But if I say to someone ‘God wants you to be happy,’ – is it really true that I’ll be taken to mean ‘God wants you to never experience stress or inconvenience, God wants you to have amazing luck on poker night and God wants everyone in your life to constantly flatter and fawn over you, God wants your coffee to be the right color every day’

My interest here—despite the clear presence of my bias(es)—is asking questions, not making assumptions. I’ve noticed a kind of isolation—a loneliness and pinching of the heart—when I hear yet another Christian authority figure explain, like they’re offering me some precious, difficult insight at which I couldn’t possibly hope to arrive independently—that God doesn’t care if I’m happy.

You, too, I wonder? If yes, let’s talk??

(….but like, only if you’re happy to. Lol.)

[1] can’t be fucked :)

In due course, my friend asked me a very obvious—if landmine treading—question: ‘what do you think of IVF as a Christian?’ In view of our relationship, and probably because I’m a mom, AND probably because this sort of complex quandary almost inevitably steels one to seek counsel, there’s no reason the question should’ve caught me off guard. And yet there I sat—no stranger to the immense, needling value clash IVF can raise for religious individuals with particular views about pregnancy and personhood longing for but (painfully) unable to have children of their own—dumb and mute as a rock.

My honest emotional reaction in the moment was certainly relief. Please try not to judge me too harshly. I’m exceptionally grateful that I never needed to personally grapple with the emotional, spiritual, and physical concerns of infertility or extended infertility treatments. I’ve also never experienced the deep-seated desire for children native in the hearts of many women—I was fearful and ambivalent, but just open enough—frankly, just brave enough—to intentionally get pregnant with my beloved son. (If you don’t think pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood require the courage of a lance-hardened, battle-worn knight of high medieval lore, kindly remove yourself from my Substack and my life) I had no trouble conceiving, no trouble carrying—my experience was, in terms of all the major health touchpoints—straightforward, normal.

The snarl of what often feels and looks like cosmic cruelty and unfairness—the desperate desire of women to have their own babies foiled over and over for reasons that will never become clear this side of heaven—is not one I’m able to untangle, nor is it my aim here. I know and adore many families who have their little ones because of IVF’s success. The brief paralysis I experienced with my friend resolved itself in an answer along the following lines:

The only thing I know for certain is that you will find, should you look—even in exclusively Christian circles—vehement opposition to IVF, and vehement defense for it. In view of this battleground, my most sincere and reliable Christian instinct is to take your concern and petition to God in prayer, and make that supplication & correspondence your guiding priority. These opposing realities (the world of ‘for’ and the world of ‘against’) are notably exacerbated at the existential level by many Christians living in what appears to be open contradiction; namely traditional pro-lifers who elect to get pregnant via IVF.

Perhaps the obvious impulse here is to ‘call-out’ this contradiction—to invoke the seamlessness favored by logicians: for the sake of consistency, be pro-IVF and pro-choice, or against IVF and pro-life. I know at least one public intellectual with a medical background who spends his life literally splitting the hairs of which kinds of day-after pill are acceptable before the Divine gaze (down to the day and precise hour they were taken and the projected point of conception, etc) and which are an instant moral atrocity

I don’t know about you, but nothing gives me a more unadulterated case of ‘the ick’ than the notion of berating (or even mildly ‘frowning’ on) grieved, earnest people who want families with the perennial personhood debate, (because after all, it’s not really about the onset of ‘life,’ for Christians, but the far more weighted and conceptually abstract onset of personhood) though it is real and urgent enough. People want to live out their comparatively short lives before God with as much happiness and as little suffering as possible—we are often each other’s greatest obstacles to this humble goal. I’m not talking about the lazy, haphazard moral cowardice implicit in ‘if unpleasant and divisive, let’s never examine or discuss’ modes of existence. The more I applied my heart and mind to these raw, cortisol-elevating questions, the more I realized that almost everyone lives—to some extent, in some sector of existence—with contradictions of some kind or other. We are large, we do contain multitudes, and often those multitudes can go to war. My desire is not to cover our open contradictions in a warm blanket of excuses. Rather, it is to exhort us to a kind of radical compassion journeying through this vale tears simply necessitates. It is to ask, without assumption or pre-formed conclusion, what would Jesus do? (Or the more exciting, more difficult present-tense version: what does Jesus do?)

There is a certain profile of human, one that can only cope with black and white canvases and strict binaries, (which makes some sense of why they find lived reality, whose fluid nature makes the idea of a universe solely predicated on inflexible categories immediately absurd, so stymying) that will call this kind of exhortation to compassion a cop-out, an avoidance mechanism with some feely word-salad stuffed around the edges for good measure. It’s no such thing. Indeed, the refusal to sink a flag deep into the soil of an established and well-appointed ‘side’ exposes a one to a harsh and occasionally vicious 21^st century affliction called tribelessness. There is an extreme and tangible reward to declaring that you ‘did the research’ and ‘see things clearly,’ and have decided. The world I inhabit—not to mention the people I inhabit it with, not to mention my own heart—is fragmented, mercurial, weary, prone to despair and confusion. Simply acknowledging that this is so can expand the soul’s horizons and send it seeking upward for a reality that holds, transcends, and restores this one.

So. Here is the quiet, steady good news I reserve for myself when I sink yet again into a state of exhausting disillumination and inner conflict. The Christ of the heart (hart?) caught in the thicket will make you new regardless of hills you do or don’t die on. He will become the one certitude covering all other unanswerable—indeed impossible questions and calculations related to living and identity and eternity and morality and suffering and joy; the one voice to heed above the *maddening* surge of earthly roars claiming authority and supremacy and righteousness. Without just such a Christ, I’d have long ago folded my frail tent and abandoned camp.

There is, of course, a difference between contradiction and paradox. One name for the gateway from one to the other is compassion—its way is narrow, and too few pass through.

I don’t believe that my lack of belief in my own prayer (tangible as I prayed, btw) automatically cancels out my—or any—upward petition. I also don’t think my earnest feelings (tangible as I prayed, which isn’t always the case) serve to make things somehow viable with God, as though emotion is the key to ‘true’ supplication.

In recent years, ‘thoughts and prayers’ have become functionally synonymous with inaction, insincerity, and even incompetence. The reasons for this are straightforward to me, and (my take) so legitimate I won’t take the time to mount a defense for the jeerers and sneerers that arise to publicly rebuff ‘thoughts and prayers’ when leaders pop the phrase once again from their Pez-dispenser mouths in the wake of the tragedy du jour. I think the public record alone defends them. This phrase has undoubtedly become the worst kind of platitude.

In the bin with prayer, then? Pretty tempting. But any serious attempt to follow the Christ encounterable in the gospels nixes that idea quickly, leaving many of us (I cannot imagine I’m alone) caught between a rock I’ll call ‘prayer routinely appears to do fuck-all’ and a hard place: ‘faith in Christ demands I never succumb to the notion of prayer as useless or irrelevant.’

This sticky spiritual Hard Rock Cafe generates other questions. What are our true expectations when we pray? Ought we have expectations? I could copy-paste some Bible verses indicating a resounding ‘yes!’ But let me follow with this question—ought we expect that prayer will solve our problems? Ought we expect it to resolve, say, mass-starvation and suffering the likes of which is happening every second in Sudan, in Palestine, in countless microcosms of hell across the globe?

Ensconced in the other-worldly brilliance of poet and essayist Anne Carson via Wrong Norma yesterday evening, I encountered the phrase “What do answers answer, anyway?” The context wasn’t related to prayer, but the panoply of stymying questions that emerge perennially about the nature of human existence—though I’d say the connective tissue between these two is obvious. Is prayer about the answers we hope to receive? I leave this non-rhetorical, open-ended question here, the cud of which we of the bovine persuasion may chew anon.

The fact of the matter is, we cannot know how God receives and utilizes individual or corporate prayer. We can (and often do, quite painfully) know God doesn’t always use them in a way that satisfies the pray-er. We also know that prayer is essential—meaning it is, despite all contrary appearances—deeply good. We can know that it is good to pray, that it is necessary to pray, even if we release all other ideas and expectations regarding the nature—and result—of prayer.

Recent cultural trends mean we can also know how to haul out ‘thoughts & prayers’ as an utterly empty virtue signal—this is a trend actual thinkers and prayers can slowly reverse by using fewer hashtags and more donated dollars, more time, and more attention invested in the particular needs of those suffering in our midst.

Join me in praying for Sudan. I pin my prayers on a living God, one who bleeds through the pinholes—this comforts me.

Join me in understanding the conflict.

Join me in donating.

Join me in dismantling the #thoughtsandprayers clout and money vehicle driven by politicians who care about power agendas more than *they will ever care about alleviating human suffering*

“...prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God. The quality of attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.”

―Simone Weil, Waiting for God

This collection…a dizzyingly cathartic outcry of doubt, joy and pain…contains (among other things) dozens of poems sharing—across many pages—a single title and preoccupation: “Do You Believe In God?”

The poems vary in tone and content; in their desire to comfort and interrogate and shriek and laugh and climax by turns. Reading them, I was struck anew by the sheer emphasis on, the crushing weight of the stoic, self-serious verb ‘believe’, and all we automatically prevail upon it to entail and carry across a mere four vowels and three consonants.

Sorry to get all meta, guys, but….I found myself acutely needled with a not-unfamiliar question:

What is belief?

Have you ever given yourself over to the gravity of this ponderance? What’s the difference between, say, belief and opinion? Belief and preference? Belief and dogma?

How often have I used this word myself with a kind of passive, ignorant urgency, without straining it through the purifying alkaline waters of meaning-making or etymological connective tissue?

A crap-ton of times, it turns out.

Is a belief simply intentional, embedded thought? Fancy abstract cognition? Truth-claim situated executive function? Perhaps a mental relationship, some unprovable-yet-maintainable flagpole in the soft mercurial grounds of knowledge. Friends: like a good and incurably lazy millennial, I hit the googles (fuck you Chat GPT <3) and discovered something intensely interesting:

The word’s origin can be traced to Proto-Germanic and ultimately to the Proto-Indo-European root leubh-, which signifies “to care, desire, love”

Cool, the bb poet has chills. (It’s me—so embarrassing—I’m the bb poet) – whatever else is or isn’t going on with belief, the phenomenon (action?) shares little to no DNA with the human head and what happens therein. Instead, it’s bound up closely with the mysterious mechanics of a very different organ.

If I answer, then, the question of ‘belief’ in God with ‘I think that he/she/they exist,’ there’s already a significant semantical gap between the question and my answer. Also, why is existence—being—always the primary/assumed formulation of belief-based questions? Anyone? Does epistemology model ontology, as Polkinghorne so famously contends? But I digress.

So far as I can tell, (…aka so far as I’ve been able to cobble together in yet another existential crisis with the internet and motivational fumes of my FEELINGS at my disposal) belief is necessarily some kind of orientation—and commitment—of self to (a particular) reality. I couldn’t parse it further, but I hope you can. Belief is apparently inherently devotional, living nearer to love than thinking—it’s not inherently intellectual, though the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

In any case, I love what this enlivened understanding does for my profound, visceral sense that the world—Creation, I do…believe….—is not some random cosmic trick. That my faculties aren’t simply lying to me and prompting ceaseless irrational electrical responses. When I look at a room and see a chair, I almost always believe the chair will bear me up. This experience does not seem to account for or even relate to my experience of Divinity and belief, though I can certainly mentally fixate on Christ and watch him swim around the shallow and disappointing pool of my brain.

Now the sticky stuff.

Does love pre-suppose belief? Does belief pre-suppose love? Have we been asking, for millennia, the wrong question—one that contains that wrong operative word—about God? If you don’t ‘believe’ in God, can you love God? Vice versa?

Let me leave you in the beautifully fraught, achingly lovely hands of Padraig:

Do You Believe in God?

I turn to you,
not because I trust you,
or believe in you,
but because I need a direction for my need. You—
the space between me and death; you—
the hum at the heart of an atom; you—
nothing; you—my favorite emptiness; you—
what I turned away from and will turn to; you—
my ache made manifest in address; you,
silent you, what my friends saw as they died; you
contain what’s not containable; you
are the shape of my desire—

***

*

Do You Believe in God?

I don’t believe in God, I said, and she said, Oh?
Somehow I thought you’d managed to keep that going
even though I haven’t. She asked if I’d told others.

Yes, I said, I have. I mean, it’s not like I’m
saying I Know About What Is. It’s just that the burden
of belief isn’t on me anymore. God, it feels much freer.

I believe I’m in the room next to belief. I hear
the sounds of prayers coming through the walls. I like
the smell of incense. And the sound of fabric rustling fabric

as the people stand or kneel. Sometimes I can tell
the text by the intonation of the reader. I mutter
the responses underneath my breath. Lift up your hearts.

And do you? she asked, Lift up your heart?
Yes, I said, I do, but I don’t know to who.
Whom, she said, Let’s get started on the soup.

PS

let’s, at the very least, believe in each other. it suddenly feels important.

…despite my customary aversion, I’ve today found myself inspired by some impressive and useful lists I’ve seen floating around the ether—reading lists, of course—lists that represent the landscapes of literary imaginations I admire. In encountering these lists, it occurred to me that I’ve never formally (by way of a list) examined my own literary formation, and was seized with the desire to do so

in addition to poetry—which I must leave to one side for now, as accounting for poetic influences in addition to other works primary to my imagination feels totally overwhelming—I’m a rabid consumer of fiction, novels in particular. And so:

(in no particular order, because frankly I couldn’t possibly)

1. Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset – the sheer scope of this book— its examination of one life lived (beginning to end) in newly-Christianized Norway is for me truly an almost unparalleled piece of 20^th century literature, no small wonder its author won the Nobel Prize. Even Middlemarch doesn’t quite touch it. Most of us read looking for a profound point of integration and contact with reality—I related to the titular character in ways that froze my blood; such a complete cloning of inner life and inward thought I’ve not encountered since. Even without its appeal to me personally, though, this novel is worth its weight in gold

2. LOTR/The Silmarillion – Tolkien’s works live inside me, an indwelling that first occurred when I was tiny that has—with beauty, richness, and edification---sustained and refreshed me throughout the course of my life. I cannot pay JRR the debt I owe him.

3. Middlemarch by George Eliot – yes, of course. And Dorothea Brooke, her lofty aspirations, her willfulness, her complicated fate—I needed to become intimate with these, and I’m grateful I did.

4. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte – gothic romance! existential torture! spiritual/moral lessons! the singular exemplary bad-assery of Jane!

5. Villette by Charlotte Bronte ^ same-same, but different. Lesser known, but equal to (hot-take—better than??) JE.

6. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy – my god, I sat in agonized silence for an indefinite amount of time upon closing it: grief, awe

7. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell – classism! sexism! the industrial revolution! enemies-to-lovers arc!

8. The Idiot by Dostoevsky (omg Nastasya tho)

9. The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky (omg: every character) - read it as a college freshman and have a little existential crisis, the first of many—12/10 recommend

10. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy – the book’s own word on its deliciously ungovernable, madly passionate heroine, Bathsheba Everdeen:

“She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.” – Hell yeah. Also ideally my personal obituary.

11. 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – but good luck tracking all the generations of Remedioses. Godspeed. also yellow butterflies. I didn’t actually adore this book—magic realism is not my genre—but it’s so undeniably remarkable it has to be on this list

12. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy – if you want to cry, *a lot* or sink slowly down onto a chaise lounge

13. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens – a prolific and extraordinary work from one of our most enduring English-language voices. especially appealing if you’re a classic #redemptionarc bae #afarfarbetterthing

14. Till We Have Faces – totally singular in the works of C.S. Lewis – strange, sparse, heated, painful, instructive—the experience of pulling a thorn slowly out of one’s hand and finding it oddly beautiful

15. The Count of Monte Cristo – high adventure lovers (that also cherish excellent writing) – this is for you, big time

16. The entire Jane Austen canon – duh, but especially our beloved P & P and S & S

17. Black Beauty by Anna Sewell – her only novel, because she died, and it’s a true loss for literature, I think—BB is one of the most bittersweet and elegant explorations of empathy and fidelity available in children’s lit

18. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson – I can feel you rolling your eyes, but it lives up to the hype

19. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath – I can feel you rolling your eyes, but once again….

20. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera – such a captivating excavation of the human condition and moral ambiguity you’ll have to go lie down afterwards

21. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula le Guin – remarkably ingenious and emotionally stymying, a masterclass in risk-taking, a laboratory in which love is the key chemical agent

22. Little Women by LMA – did I think I was Jo March? Yes, obviously; plz judge and ridicule me for the completely ubiquitous conflation every single passionate, book-bent girl *ever* makes when reading this novel

23. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley – you’ll be reeling with admiration. also abject horror

24. The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard – a lesser known gem. I’ve rarely (never?) seen prose handled like poetry after the fashion of SH *anywhere* - a marvel

25. The Green Knight by Iris Murdoch – not her most famous book, but if you want to roll around deep in the psyche of this remarkable philosopher/novelist (and you should) you’ll want this one on your shelves

Oddments-

I don’t have the energy to add my short story hall of fame, but Ethan Frome would be first, followed the sum total in Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge

Grave Admissions and Omissions:

- I only read half of Infinite Jest

- I haven’t read Dante’s works cover to cover

- nor the foundational Greeks (Iliad Odyssey Aeneid – only snippets!)

Current Reading:

- more Murdoch! this time her significantly more famous The Book and the Brotherhood

- still slowly making my way through Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which is *a trip* - but a wildly good one. I will say there are scenes therein that make the extended Love Letters of James Joyce look like child’s play—yes, I know, and yes: seriously. This book faced an obscenity trial in 1974 when the Pulitzer Prize Advisory Board rejected the fiction jury’s unanimous recommendation that it win—certainly it should’ve won, and certainly the trial is unsurprising to anyone that’s actually read this novel

Aspirations:

Don Quixote is on the shortlist, along with mending my above omissions. I will *hardcore* die before I finish my long-list—a point of pride.

happy reading everyone!

may we rejoice that nerd life chose us

xx

Chapter 22 is one of those vivid passages replete with so much complexity and concurrent heavenly and earthly action that I lean back and think—‘ok…is it just me, or is this some seriously wild shit??’

If you happen to back up just one paragraph to the end of Chapter 21, you encounter Ahab (reigning King of Israel and infamous husband to the yet more infamous Jezebel) *not* as a morally bankrupt monster; though verse 25—interestingly offered as a kind of aside in parenthesis—sets one up to expect this: “There was none who sold himself to do what was evil in the sight of the Lord like Ahab, whom Jezebel his wife incited.” ….so there’s that. But wouldn’t you know it, after receiving a *truly hideous* prophecy from Elijah—one foretelling imminent and grisly demise related to the aforementioned evil, this dude aggressively and publicly repents—sackcloth, ashes, dejection, the works. I’m inclined to think any heart capable of sincere repentance is not completely corrupt—we’ll see shortly that God is similarly inclined.

We’re seemingly looking at a bit of an Anakin Skywalker situation with Ahab here, who has a little come-to-Jesus (albeit B.C.) moment after being informed dogs would soon be licking up his blood in the streets…and then? God buys it. God’s like, ‘you know what Elijah? This repentance is looking pretty legit, I’m gonna hold fire’ –

“…have you seen how Ahab has humbled himself before me? Because he has humbled himself before me, I will not bring the disaster in his days” (vs 29)

SO, this cozy, heart-warming episode closes chapter 21. Chapter 22 opens several years later, where we discover the apparently ubiquitous human impulse to land-wars arising in Ahab, who texts his bro Jehoshaphat king of Judah, ‘dude we’re going to battle to reclaim Ramoth-gilead from Syria later if you wanna come thru’

And then things get seriously interesting:

Jehoshaphat’s first response—before he does anything else—is to affirm his close relationship with Ahab: “I am as you are, my people as your people, my horses as your horses.” – only after broship confirmation—a purely relational move—does Jehoshaphat venture to say “Inquire first for the word of the Lord.” Ahab immediately concedes to this request, rounding up no less than four hundred prophets RE the inquiry ‘Land War or Nah??’ Spoiler, chapter 22 is titled ‘Ahab and the false prophets’ Predictably, this motley crew tells him exactly what he wants to hear: “Go up, for the Lord will give it into the hand of the king.”

Our boi Jehoshaphat smells BS, though, so he says “Is there not here another prophet of the Lord of whom we may inquire?” What happens next provokes me so much. Presumably, Ahab could easily say ‘lol: no.’ But he doesn’t. Instead he grudgingly—almost touchingly—admits: “There is yet one man by whom we may inquire of the Lord, Micaiah the son of Imlah, but I hate him, for he never prophesies good concerning me, but evil.” LOLOL. How relatable is this?!?! ‘Pleaseeeee, not this fucking guy.’ Ahab—‘evil’ Ahab—doesn’t conceal this disagreeable reality from his friend, and the prophet Micaiah (who’s clearly been a real buzz-kill) is immediately sent for. The courtly Uber driver responsible for fetching him attempts to grease the wheels in favor of the king’s ego: “Behold, the words of the prophets with one accord are favorable to the king. Let your word be like the word of one of them, and speak favorably.” ¹⁴ But Micaiah said, “As the Lord lives, what the Lord says to me, that I will speak.” So it looks like we’ve got a noble, pure-hearted hard-ass on our hands, which is what you really want in a prophet.

But then things get weird again. Four seconds after Micaiah rocks up to the throne room and is handed the ‘Land War or Nah??’ memo, he proceeds to do precisely what he said he wouldn’t do, saying to Ahab exactly what he wants to hear, joining the unanimous voice of the existing prophet-mob. Weird, right? A moral failure? Or simply a sign of deep fatigue in our noble prophet? It isn’t clear. And things are about to get weirder. Instead of being content with this hugely desirable lip-service, Ahab pushes back, (????) saying “How many times shall I make you swear that you speak to me nothing but the truth in the name of the Lord?”

Wait, what?!

Pressed for the truth in this manner, Micaiah delivers the generally shitty (real) prophecy of abject failure and death, and the weirdness reaches its climax:

‘I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing beside him on his right hand and on his left; ²⁰ and the Lord said, ‘Who will entice Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?’ …²¹ Then a spirit came forward and stood before the Lord, saying, ‘I will entice him.’ ²² And the Lord said to him, ‘By what means?’ And he said, ‘I will go out, and will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.’ And he said, ‘You are to entice him, and you shall succeed; go out and do so.’

Ok. We’ve got God sitting up in heaven like some kind of mob-boss, hoping one of His (and this ambiguity interests me immensely) non-human servants—an angel?? or some kind of fallen-angel/demon better suited to dark dispensations?? – ‘entices’ Ahab to his death in battle. I’m just going to point out that this seems, you know, not very nice, even if we do understand it as a righteous judgment, which I think is certainly what the text wants of us.

And then there’s the evocative meta-thread of this narrative: God reveals all of this in detail to Ahab (the active heavenly plotting against his life) before it happens—which is what prophecy is. Just one chapter ago, Ahab’s subsequent reaction to the very same situation *caused God to change his mind* and spare him.

Now, after offering the actual true prophecy he was urged by the king to reveal after some initial lip-service, Micaiah is thrown in prison: Ahab’s orders. I personally take this as a wonderful illustration of how absurdly irrational the human creature is. After this, all goes according to plan (or prophecy) – Ahab decides to go into battle in disguise—he’s quickly dispatched, and subsequently replaced as king by his (shitty) son.

To me, these things together speak of the human person as extraordinarily emotionally and morally complex and—alarmingly—subject to utterly unpredictable changes of heart that have immense consequences. Of long-term interest:

1. Jehoshaphat, the ‘good guy’ king, does not say ‘inquire of the Lord’ immediately when Ahab propositions him for wartime allyship. Instead, the first thing he does is say something like ‘what’s mine is yours’ – a gesture at least as relational as it is political. The text does not easily offer an interpretation involving insincerity or manipulation. He subsequently goes to war with Ahab even after receiving the prophecy of failure from the prophet he himself pushed for, sensing the prolific falsehoods at hand. These are troubling, interesting, dense nuances

.

2. God seems to have given up on Ahab (Ahab was, after all, given many warnings and chances) – I’m not sure how else to register God’s seeming desire that he be enticed into a foolish and unnecessary death. Does God give up on people? Or is it just that His omniscience means He knows Ahab will never really come around, so what reads as ‘giving up’ is actually an acceptance of Ahab’s free (evil) choices, paired with perfect, divine understanding these will ultimately be ‘against’ Him?

3. How does God’s omniscience intersect with the many places he—in ‘real’ (human) time—changes His mind, as He does regarding Ahab’s fate in chapter 21? What does it mean that human action can prompt God to change? What are the implications, if any, of 1 Kings Ch 22 for determinism vs freedom RE human & divine will?

This formulaic, familiar-yet-strange utterance of my name in prayer and my subsequent reaction awakened me—as from a prolonged coma—to the knowledge that I’d been self-excluding for a very long time when it came to the idea of rendering meaningful service to the Almighty. I’d gradually (consciously and subconsciously) surrendered myself to the notion that I was simply an unresolved problem for God, a tragically ill-equipped combatant, a well-begun but ultimately failed project—you get the idea.

After a life—early childhood, adolescence, emerging adulthood—lived in the simultaneous comforts and confines of an active faith that might be accurately described as conservative in all of its particulars and manifestations, I was a ship run suddenly aground following the comparatively smooth sailing of my twenties, enmeshed in an ever-deepening web of fear and doubt regarding how to read and understand Christian scripture…the Bible’s a fairly big deal if you’re, like, using it to draw 100% of your weightiest (indeed, eternal) conclusions RE how to rightly exist in the world, not to mention its peerless position as means of knowing the living and ultimate Author (let’s leave to one side the considerable amount of scholars/scholarship shrieking ‘human text riddled with human errors—I know, guys.) My point is not to submerge us in the endless minutiae of myriad takes on the Bible…how it should be read and why, how much authority it does or does not possess—to satisfy reader curiosity, I can say I’ve traveled surprisingly little in understanding the Bible as (pardon some jargon) infallible but not inerrant, possessed of divine authority—the textual cradle of the living Christ. Pretty orthodox stuff, actually. Some people will be relieved to know that, others will face-palm; so it goes.

In any case—none of this helped me much hermeneutically when it came to the deluge of issues that began to trouble my conservatism with steadily increasing urgency—human sexuality, the nature of damnation and eternal destinations, the role(s) of woman/women. A chorus of voices—voices with church authority, voices bolstered by endless stacks of degrees from our loftiest institutions—were (and are) eager to wage exegetical war RE all the notoriously troubling and oft-contested passages. The literature is *immense.* Overwhelmingly so. For a while—and with trembling—I paid close attention to the interpretational tug-of-wars regarding, say, what *exactly* Paul refers to when he says πορνεία (porneia) in Ephesians (just fornication? or specifically prostitution/coercive sexual abuse?? Etc.) Ideally, pleas to the Holy Spirit for some kind of ultimate, transcendent insight regarding where to finally plant my little flag amongst these culturally swirling and rapidly accumulating issues would be answered, eliminating my doubt-paralysis.

No such clarity, after much prayer, was forthcoming. Friends, there is huge, huge burnout associated with this kind of spiritual malaise. Doubting feels like sinning. When people speak of doubt, they’re typically referring to God’s existence. My doubts never flew down that path. I had far smaller, linguistically-situated doubts about how to live my life—and teach my child— according to a sacred text…an ancient, translated and re-translated text over which multiple authorities with access to the original languages live in open, ceaseless dispute. The noise became deafening, and God’s voice seemed to go with it. I did not—have not—thrown off my faith. I did throw off much of my conservatism; and was naturally treated as though I’d thrown Jesus off with it, because in very conservative circles Jesus and theological (and often political, yikes) conservatism are synonymous—conceptually indivisible.

The 1700^th anniversary of the Ecumenical Council at Nicaea is fast approaching. The world council of churches is planning a celebration. Raised in high liturgical traditions, I’ve recited the Nicene Creed long enough to have it firmly committed to memory.

The creed makes no mention of many of today’s most hotly debated issues—given its age, this isn’t surprising. Luckily we’re done deciding (formally, anyway) what gets to be included in the canon—do keep in mind it took a breezy 1600 years to compile. God did not zap down a book. (That was more of a one-time tablet deal with Moses) That he elected to work through/with (despite??) humanity is of interest, if you subscribe to this stuff like I do. So the Bible *is* an intensely human set of documents—and the decisions about what comprised the final text were human, too, though of course we must say God presided and guided—if we don’t, it does become one more nice old book among many. I think about what credal battles would be waged today at a similar council. Would attempts be made at

- ‘I believe that God ordained erotic love and marriage exclusively for heterosexual individuals and that scripture makes this totally explicit to the point of being indisputable’ –

- ‘I believe that women are co-bearers of the Image, but ultimately function—domestically, ecclesiastically and societally—in ways that do not and cannot equal their more significant male counterparts –

- I believe in the specific Hell introduced to the Christian imagination by Dante, an eternal cosmic-but-physical torture chamber to which you are SENT if you do not REPENT, hashtag turn or burn

….but I digress. My point is this: I allowed my angst and confusion over these quite particular, culturally loud (because relevant) issues to pull me out of the arms of Jesus—I needn’t have. Still, on a personal and social level, it’s getting very difficult, because of the country and time I am inhabiting, to proudly proclaim Christian identity. Once upon a time, ‘Christian’ meant—very simply—follower of Jesus Christ. Here among the stars and stripes, it now appears to mean a host of other things that have little or nothing to do with the kingdom of heaven, and less yet to do with good news for the down-trodden and poor. By and large, conservative Christians have ‘sided’ (we’re big into sides around here) with conservative Republicanism.

But conservative theology and conservative policy aren’t actually identical animals, entwined as they’ve become.

I have loose but useful definitions & distinctions for conservative vs liberal Christian theologies. Conservative Christian theology funnels human existence—all of life—through the filter of Holy Scripture. Scripture defines, therefore, both how life is lived, and why, and for whom. Liberal theology more or less reverses this, filtering the scriptures through contemporary lived reality and understanding them in light of the modern experience. I’m in the middle these days—having found a careful mix and balance of these methods offers most often the Fruits of the Spirit.

I left the exclusively conservative model behind for good when I witnessed sincere, Christ-loving people around me filter an ongoing genocide in Gaza through Genesis 12:3 and subsequently *grow scales over each of the 5 senses* - radical take, maybe, but when the theological lens you’re using actually enables continuous genocide, there’s a problem. If engagement with the Bible is producing an eyes-wide-shut effect on crimes against humanity, it’s time to interrogate the way we read it.

Silver lining:

The thief on the cross received no doctrinal cross-examining, no theological turning-out-of-pockets. I’ve always thought his fate the most enviable of anyone in the gospels—criminal to crown the span of a day. This is the staggering, logic-defying generosity of grace. So for now, relinquishing the need for perfect scriptural clarity, I choose to believe that the destabilizing of ideas regarding the human person I formerly held as fixed will not automatically exclude me from Paradise. I can love and serve the Lord—even in a beleaguered America—as I am: another broken but hopeful vessel among an endless sea of the same, praying always that the God of Love is my end as surely as He is my origin. Yours, too.

But the seed of restoration only sprouts, I’m learning, when we give ourselves permission to occupy states of being without the imposition of chronos; when we say things like ‘Maybe I’ll grieve this forever, and that’s ok.’

We need not define ourselves by our griefs, but even if we do—depending on how we tread the fine fault-line between bitterness and tenderness—I can imagine far worse ways to center an identity.

And however we strive to construct the self, we will to a far greater extent be built—made, called into a specific existence—by the people around us, and serve in this architectural capacity for others.

I’ve written before about the harrowing fact that (roughly) 30% of what we believe about ourselves is the hardwired result of reflections from other people. Despite this, human interdependency and its scourge (the ways in which we give and receive wounds) seem forever at war with the eternally popular idea of self-sufficiency, which suggests that relying on others is—in addition to being untenable & indicative of weakness—embarrassing.

Here, I must turn to the enduring voice of CS Lewis:

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

On the cusp of 35—watching ‘young’ adulthood recede further into the distance each day—I’ve enjoyed/survived/relished/succumbed to/celebrated enough life to know heartache well. What I didn’t know was how, Mary Oliver box-full-of-darkness style, to let this soften and edify my spirit, or how to stop actively waiting and expecting to be ‘free’ from pain.

My definition of freedom has undergone radical transformation. The new one involves rejoicing over the places in which my heart has broken; (you read that right) calling those places blessed, fertile ground for the deepening of my humanity, my pathos—my very self. Clive Staples would, I hope, be proud.

I’m sorry to affirm the soul is subject to all manner of brutality. Maybe you’ve experienced the strange and cruel wait, do-I-no-longer-exist (?!) annihilationism of ghosting. Maybe you’ve witnessed—whether abrupt or gradual—the cessation of care, or mutual faith, or play—with someone you love. Maybe you’ve known death up close. Maybe you’ve looked in the mirror and had no sense of the person staring back at you. Maybe your relationship with your family has collapsed. Maybe you lost God, or lost sleep wondering if God lost you. Maybe your finances are in shambles. Maybe your dream was deferred. Maybe you failed someone. Maybe you caused harm, small or great. Maybe you can’t remember the last time your inner child felt safe. I don’t know.

We don’t know each-other, (or maybe we do) but my message for you is one of hope. Bitter herbs make some of the strongest and most potent medicines. Mourning can turn to dancing—and even when she doesn’t, there is a way to befriend her and sit beneath her instruction. As Louise Glück prophesied, (half of poetry is prophecy, I’ve discovered) there is a door at the end of your suffering. I can’t wait for you to meet the self you encounter once you’ve passed through.

and dark doors o Anima Anima

where are you breathing?

Here is the dark sun, the blood

moon. We call, all out of flame, all

out of time: ashes. Give us the burning

name, consecrate our catatonic element—

fall.

My MFA classmate (now close friend) Caiden Leavitt—for whom AD’s work was equally foreign, has contended—since encountering Dillard in her time at SPU—that she is at times (and to such an extent that, for example, C didn’t bother finishing Holy the Firm, which I loved) both overwritten and tonally off-putting. Having discovered that our minds share many preoccupations and orbital patterns of thought, we decided (spontaneously, via iMessage voice notes, no less) to take one characteristic Dillard essay and get to the bottom of Caiden’s critique. I must say ‘Caiden’s,’ because I myself was/am as moony as the rest of them for Dillard’s lush, verdant lyricism and heady mystic elevations—it was her sharper instinct that prompted further interrogation. I’m a sucker for any pretty arrangement of words on a page—this weakness often means I do not miss the meat if I’m served an attractive enough (successfully florid) appetizer. I confess this sin with shame and earnest desire for renewal, which we might otherwise call…more incisive analytical processing. May the gods of critical thinking have mercy on me, a poet. But I digress.

In we leapt with “Total Eclipse.” I noticed immediately this piece exemplifies—tidily—a Dillard trademark—namely beginning with ordinary prose in an equally quotidian scene (a hotel room and lobby, in this instance) that any person would comfortably recognize and find accessible. Then, a gradual arc of emotionally and spiritually escalated language crescendos in a sort of ecstatic disembodied euphoria or even pseudo-mania—readers are intended to find this, I think, profound, instructive, and stimulating. Then Dillard closes by slowly releasing the air from the linguistic pressure chamber the previous essay components built and filled. Obviously this intention often hits its mark. But dialoging with Caiden helped me discover it may mask something rather superficial and problematic in Dillard’s approach. First, three quotes from “Total Eclipse” (which is about, lol, a total eclipse) to illustrate the pattern described above:

On the broad lobby desk, lighted and bubbling, was a ten-gallon aquarium containing one large fish; the fish tilted up and down in its water. Against the long opposite wall sang a live canary in its cage. Beneath the cage, among spilled millet seeds on the carpet, were a decorated child’s sand bucket and matching sand shovel.

Now the alarm was set for six. I lay awake remembering an article I had read downstairs in the lobby, in an engineering magazine. The article was about gold mining.

Blah blah blah, right? Utterly familiar and even intentionally banal. For context, the essay is Dillard’s first-person account of traveling with her husband to a nearby town to witness a total eclipse of the sun from a mountaintop. And how was it, you naturally ask, the experience of the eclipse? But here is the secondary move described above, the wild, otherworldly climax, in Dillard’s own words—

The white ring and the saturated darkness made the earth and the sky look as they must look in the memories of the careless dead. What I saw, what I seemed to be standing in, was all the wrecked light that the memories of the dead could shed upon the living world. We had all died in our boots on the hilltops of Yakima, and were alone in eternity. Empty space stoppered our eyes and mouths; we cared for nothing. We remembered our living days wrong. With great effort we had remembered some sort of circular light in the sky – but only the outline. Oh, and then the orchard trees withered, the ground froze, the glaciers slid down the valleys and overlapped the towns. If there had ever been people on earth, nobody knew it. The dead had forgotten those they had loved. The dead were parted one from the other and could no longer remember the faces and lands they had loved in the light.

Wow. Well. So, Dillard and her husband apparently experienced the total evaporation of corporeal reality and selfhood. Now, as I read this (and all that came before it in the slow ascent to frenzy) I was indeed extremely taken in—taken up, rather—by the glory of the summit—thematically and linguistically. And remember, in closing we have Dillard’s clever quick-release knot: she hitches a ride back to the ordinary via a college boy’s visual metaphor. We might squabble about whether there is some light elitism in Dillard’s affable but undeniably patronizing treatment of this person, who (in apparent juxtaposition to Dillard herself) possesses far less gravitas and therefore seldom the victim of transcendental raptures:

A college student, a boy in a blue parka who carried a Hasselblad, said to us, “Did you see that little white ring? It looked like a Life Saver. It looked like a Life Saver up in the Sky,”

And so it did. The boy spoke well. He was a walking alarm clock. I myself had at that time no access to such a word. He could write a sentence, and I could not. I grabbed that Life Saver and rode it to the surface. And I had to laugh. I had been dumbstruck on the Euphrates River, I had been dead and gone and grieving, all over the sight of something which, if you could claw your way up to that level, you would grant looked very much like a Life Saver. It was good to be back among people so clever; it was good to have all the world’s words at the mind’s disposal, so the mind could begin its task.

This is the closest Dillard comes to revealing exactly how hyperbolic and fantastical her realistically (in terms of tone, not content) presented experience of the eclipse was.

Now the fun can really begin. A writer must never conflate literalism and honesty—of course, they are not the same. And while a writer may be as liberal as she pleases with the former, (meaning total fictionalization is not only acceptable but wonderful) the latter is indispensable. Caiden—who favors authors of condensed complexity like Pynchon and Faulker—was rightly balking; not at the fantastical, surreal nature of Dillard’s eclipse account, but rather (we now venture to argue) Dillard’s need to inflate her true experience with fantastical elements in order to gain credibility with her reader and implant—artificially, after the manner of a laboratory—an experience of wonder and awe. We wondered aloud together whether—in a world as whacky and impossible and glorious as the very one we find ourselves in—such an inflation is ever necessary, and whether a better road to awe—the organic kind—might be available for the author and her readers. Mighty muscles may indeed be glorious to flex, but the general public sentiment is disappointment if the glory is traced to steroid injections.

When Caiden observed that Dillard’s legendary lyricism fell short for her—even while Thomas Pynchon’s infamous absurdities and rampant rabbit-trails rewarded more sustained and strenuous effort, it felt urgent—and delightfully fun—to support and fully articulate the critique, which was mere instinct in its infancy. I was of course the greatest beneficiary here, having learned a great deal from C and AD, who my lyrically-saturated heart still loves. Our conversation and subsequent investigation yielded many lessons, but the greatest is this: in a world so densely and truly ‘charged’ with ‘grandeur,’ (holla @ me GMH fans) superimposing spiritual freneticism to bolster (any) outcome ironically hollows that which brimmed already, from the first instance, with fullness.

1. christian girl, you can do your own boudoir

   shoot if you want to. got a smartphone?

   just understand you might raise

   everything from brows to cocks

   to general indignation, that some

   might say you’ve lost your way

   while others swear you’re just

   now finding it—so be prepared

   for a big old split. boudoir

   is body-focused; you can dig up

   inspo or the theology of the body—

   christ’s holy hands and feet;

   if you’re a wifey, you can translate ‘helpmeet,’

   or mary god’s mother can usher you right

   into good motherhood—meaning

   a sword-pierced heart—which you may

   or may not elect to include.

2. but if you want a theology of female

   sensuality it gets, you know, dicey.

   people will panic and send you

   to song of songs. so we’ve always got,

   if not paris; song of songs.

   as far as your shoot is concerned,

   cover parts useful for delivering

   or feeding babies—this is the common

   consensus about what we must hide,

   and defying common consensus

   means you’re a rebel, or else that

   something in you is unwell, unsound.

   boudoir walks the edges here. do

   weigh your precipice in advance.

3. now, do you want to ask—

   to spend life asking—if you can celebrate,

   be seen celebrating—the grecian

   lines of your body?

4. i still spend lots of time wondering what’s

   allowed. i don’t think beyonce does.

   beyonce isn’t mentioned in the bible,

   so strictly speaking it’s hard to know

   what is and isn’t permissible in terms

   of beyonce. she isn’t afraid of her body,

   isn’t afraid of people witnessing

   the glory of her body, which feels so

   fresh, good to me. canticle of canticles

   a la yonce has to be something like

   i am a rose of Sharon, (see pic/dance break)

   a lily of the valleys (see pic/dance break)

5. the wages of visible skin

   vary, like mileage—could be

   awe, could be scorn,

   could be yee-haw, could be

   death by stoning, could be

   whatever your daughter saw

   and wanted to become.

   anyway all you need is

   a smartphone, a little

   pluck, the exact body

   you have and are, a desire

   to take things slightly too far

What if we threw major celebrations every time we officially outgrew any given problematic, culturally-induced dilemma that inevitably folds over, frothed-egg style, into shame? Frankly I’m not sure why this isn’t a thing, but if it was, I’d be popping some bottles.

Today I woke up and fully articulated a profoundly impactful reality I’ve been gradually internalizing since my beloved Heath arrived three and a half years ago: ‘mother’ and ‘artist’ are not competing or hierarchical claims on my identity

As soon as my brain formed and firmly closed its circuit around this dazzling little epiphany, my life was changed—instantly and indelibly—for the better. The artist/mom conundrum is an insidious false dichotomy. I don’t need to fling out the customary ‘but I’m a mom first’ virtue-signal. I don’t need to sweat when friends of friends are concerned about who’s taking care of Heath when I’m away for writing residencies (answer: his father, who acknowledges and materially honors the full spectrum of my personhood in addition to my housewifery)

We’re oddly averse to acknowledging it as a species, but love is sacrifice. Of what? Of self. Love almost invariably demands self-denial. If you love your child/ren, you will sacrifice on their behalf. If you love your art, you will sacrifice on its behalf. If you are a diligent student in the schoolroom of love, you’ll become intimately familiar with the concept—and practice—of sacrifice. This is not an endorsement of sacrificing your child’s well-being for artistic practice or, for that matter, sacrificing artistic practice for your child. It’s an endorsement of sacrificial love as a lifestyle.

The bi-tri-quad-penta-whatever-furcation of personal identity into constituent parts numbered greatest to least or vice versa is a harmful enterprise that fundamentally alienates you from who you are. Learning the intricate dance of which sacrifices to make in which direction and when is a matter of spiritual fine-tuning and (in my opinion) prayer. Our roles are only ranked if we assign rankings. Anyway, callings are higher—more expansive than roles—and we’re each of us large enough, as Walt Whitman famously understood, to contain multitudes.

The woven strands of being are thick with variety, elasticity and abundance. I feel sad when I encounter women conditioned by their circles of influence to believe they must simultaneously reduce themselves to and define themselves by child-rearing. I’m not talking about women making open-hearted, clear-eyed, intentional decisions to make motherhood their existential centerpiece. That’s fabulous, and worthy of its own celebration. I’m talking about what happens when women are made to feel the table of life must be wiped clean of non-domestic concerns in order to be fully worthy of/appropriate for domestic ones; when women inadvertently develop a kind of strained amnesia about who they used to be—or even who they are—by confusing the habitual stifling of their own souls for good, sacrificial love. They’re the ones I want most to reach, re-kindle, and invite into the liberation of this epiphany—not the cheap/false message ‘anyone can have it all,’ but the costly, true paradigm inversion that emerges when you finally excise the formula ‘indefinite self-suppression = better parenting’ from your life and mind.

It's important to acknowledge that I had (and have) the kind of help and support in arriving to these conclusions indispensable to their integrity and coherence. Critically, I had the example of my own mother, who was unconditionally present—even if she wasn’t constantly physically present—as a driving force of love, formation, and support. This reality undergirding my existence never wavered or lapsed. I was fully secure. Simultaneously, it was my implicit understanding that my mom had a whole lot—a whole life—going on that didn’t (and doesn’t to this day) intersect much with me. So, my model for motherhood was one integrated seamlessly with an already robust, mature and diverse existence…instead of the total/permanent upending of an established existence in the name of conforming to the demands of motherhood. The idea that motherhood demands we relinquish our entire sense of self has driven an entire generation of women to depression, exhaustion, and all manner of mental health crisis.

Is there a catch? Maybe. Everything about my ability to practice writing as a mother would go out the window without a supportive partner. If you’re a parent-artist struggling with the countless labors fomented by singleness or an unavailable, unsupportive spouse, I’m truly sorry. My assurance that H is more than adequately cared for in my absence—his exposure to my full investment in and commitment to things other than him critical to the development of his independence and understanding of women/mothers is entirely scaffolded by my partner and family. My role as primary caregiver is fluid, meaning my husband can pick it up without a bumpy gear-shift. Heath is fully adjusted to transitions back and forth between us. I’m so deeply grateful for and proud of this, proud of the example I’m setting for my son as a fully-actualized human being with expansive (if finite!) capacity.

I’d never tell anyone that extra—and occasionally super-human—amounts of work don’t await women-artists seeking to have families or mothers seeking to have art. Quite simply: they do. But the incessant internal tug-of-war between these realities (assuming you have the right people in your corner) can stop, and stop forever, the second you agree to throw down the rope.

Champagne, anyone?

The course of casual conversation focused briefly on memories of a mutual acquaintance. In a tone that matched his intention of perfect beneficence, my friend said, man—she might just be the most Midwestern girl of all time. My brain instantly distilled his comment to three words: pleasant and banal. I subsequently wondered how I’d feel about being described as the world’s most Midwestern girl.

Now for some disclaimers. As far as I’m concerned, hailing from any midwestern state confers upon one full authority to defend, criticize, bemoan, mythologize, or celebrate exotic middle America and its inhabitants per one’s contextual requirements. I’ve found each of these verbs relevant to my personal experience of 23 years lived within walking distance of eye-wateringly lovely Lake Michigan.

But back to my chat. When my friend made his comment, we’d been observing our own respective distances from (some) midwestern ways of moving through the world: for example, I am ostensibly not—culturally speaking—a purebred Midwesterner; being possessed of a mother from New Jersey. On reflection, this seemingly minor maternal exception to the communally established norms of my upbringing was immense. Instead of a formative diet of quaint-if-mildly-repressive midwestern niceties, I was inadvertently (some nebulous nature/nurture combo) imbued with an ability to openly (loudly) feel and express passion, astonishment, fear, doubt, etc. Grandparents raised in New York City by European immigrants and a mother raised in New York-adjacent NJ boiled down to a household largesse of imagination and awareness of non-midwestern existence that didn’t generally—at least to my memory—reflect local status quos. Childhood friends in our home were routinely gob-smacked by the presence of couscous (but what is it?? rice??) at the dinner table; when we vacationed in NOT Marco Island, FL, it was a notable break with tradition—you get the idea. I will take this opportunity to mention that my father’s people have been in Michigan pretty much from time immemorial. Oceana County basically functions as ancient Mesopotamia where the Hodges are concerned. In adolescence, I could only think of escaping to more sophisticated horizons.

If you’re hoping I’ll now move in an explicitly elitist, ‘the entire Midwest is cornfed and small-minded compared to its glittering coastal counterparts’ direction, you’re going to be disappointed. Let me instead turn to the words of a fellow poet, MFA classmate and Midwesternite, Cameron Brooks, (whose debut book Forbearance you should definitely buy)

…I believe one of the advantages of creating in the Midwest is the freedom it affords artists to focus on work, rather than the fads, politics, and personalities that often develop along the coasts.

This freedom helps explain the strange success of the Iowa Writers Workshop, for example. When you’re writing stories in the middle of a corn field, it’s hard to imagine what literary elites in L.A. will think of your work, much less care. A distinctly Midwestern arts community will work to preserve this fruitful silence.

Without deep pockets, there are increasingly few places one can go to find—let alone inhabit—the fruitful silence Brooks describes. More radical yet is the gift of such a silence being hardwired into your nervous system. I cannot begin to repay the gift rural west Michigan has given me by existing exactly as it is. For all its limitations, (every place on earth has limitations, though timbre will vary according to the type & nature of the instrument) it has preserved something of a true tabula rasa regarding formation, identity and creativity—you become yourself in ways you couldn’t hope for elsewhere, in places everyone constantly watches everyone else thanks to the dual pressures of competition and comparison. There is an expansive, relatively untapped, uniquely Midwestern liberty available for any playful mind that doesn’t want to be weighed down with trending prerequisites—put more simply, there is room. You’re not crowded out by what’s present—silence leaves as much space as it takes up. One might spend entire summers listening to wind move through dune grass and driving 25 mph behind a tractor chugging to the next field.

We cannot (ideologically or creatively) unclutter our great cities—nor should such a thing be attempted. And our most famous/alluring bulwarks of open space are frequently dedicated to the experience of ‘wilderness’ – of course, you might go to any national park out west and experience both isolation and awe. But this sensory lightning-strike takes up its own kind of space. It’s hard to be a blank tablet for creativity when your whole system is constantly catching its breath.

The Midwest is a living, breathing testimony to the kind of human flourishing uniquely accomplished through quotidian experience. You mow your lawn, you pick up your groceries, you drink Natty light at the tailgate, you cheer the home team. Even midwestern cities—Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit—retain something of these slower, grass-root rhythms. When inquired about the kinetic potential of combining Midwestern creative ethos with established, global bastions of thought, (specifically Oxford, with whom I have a brief but fiery dating history) the odd collision of worlds I’d only known (very) separately got me worked up, excited.

My friend and I ended our conversation by speaking wistfully of the homes we’d love to buy for our families on Lake Michigan. I may be a little…intense…compared to Paula-the-organist in line behind me at Meijer, (fictional) but I’ve jumped fully-clothed into the channel (iykyk) with the best of them, I’ve ravished buckets of deep-friend asparagus, (iykyk) I’ve been chased off the beach after-hours by DNR officers. I’ve changed local letter-board signs from respectable restaurant offerings to ‘TEABAG DR SEUSS.’ I don’t have a mitten tattoo to honor my heritage, but ask me this time next year. Never imagine the Midwest isn’t the finest cradle and incubator for America’s most prolific and capable artists—the list is long, and growing. Just don’t expect good couscous.