Month: June 2014

Brian Bouldrey, editor of the collection Wrestling with the Angel: Faith and Religion in the Lives of Gay Men, reflects on Hans Holbein’s painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb:

[F]or me, the painting looks clearly like something else I knew quite well: Christ looks like another death from AIDS. Has nobody made this connection before? I’ve looked in libraries and on line, but nothing. My partner Jeff, who died in 1993—it’s the spitting image. The Dead Christ looks like the man I love and loved and all those other men dead from HIV. The bruises like kaposi’s sarcoma, the gaunt drawn face and slack downturned mouth. That painting is for me a grenade of past experience made horribly fresh and present. When I look at it, it sends me back to that moment, and I despair, I have to grieve all over again, I have to start all over, I have to do all the work to reflect upon that experience. …

Nobody wants to talk about the AIDS era any more, even and especially the ones who survived it, watched our lovers and friends suffer, die, and get buried, but never rise again, a great game of hide and seek in which nobody ever got found.

It was terrifying and hopeless, we survivors are all children who still look into clothes hampers and closets and hope they will suddenly just be there, still hiding. Here: look what I’m doing: making a narrative of something that has no story left to it. There was no romance to AIDS, though I think the foolish young me wanted it to be romantic, just as those who want a messiah are romantics. I loved the romantic stories of the saints, which drew me into their useful mythology the way demigods do in Greek myths—men and gods are inert, but the demigods, not quite of this world or that, little monsters, they get the ball rolling. It was God, then, that I had the hardest part with, way up there, just being, rather than doing.

I keep thinking that I have to restore myself in order to honor those who suffered like the man who is the Dead Christ, if you accept that the dead man in Holbein’s painting is the Dead Christ, which is, in itself, a declaration of faith, at least the beginning of one. But what I must instead do is lose myself and dig myself out from the moment. Resurrection, rebirth cannot happen until one dies. Hope dies every time I look at the Holbein. That is the strangest kind of resurrection story.

(Image of The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, with detail below, via Wikimedia Commons)

Julie Lyons pens a captivating profile of Larry and Marion Pollard, who perform exorcisms in their West Texas ranch home. Lyons describes witnessing the exorcism, or “deliverance session,” of a woman named Ruth:

“Get up and face me,” [Larry] commands, in a Texas drawl. “I want the one that is trying to intimidate, to act like the big boss. Get up here and face me right now. I call you to judgment.”

Genial, wisecracking Ruth vanishes. A metamorphosis takes place, with subtle changes in voice, movement, and expression. Her head begins to shake and bob. Her arms tense up and straighten. Her fingers stiffen and arch upward. Her head jerks to the left, avoiding Larry’s steady, unsmiling gaze.

Marion, 65, looks on beside them, praying quietly.

“Turn the head right now and look at me,” Larry demands. “Who are you?”

The head snaps forward and drops. The mouth lets out a long sigh—ahhhhh. A robotic, vaguely masculine voice responds: “What do you want?”

“What is your function?” Larry asks.

“I have no function except to torment,” the voice answers. The eyes are fixed in a way that is glaring yet vacant.

“Do you have a right to her? Yes or no?” Larry asks.

“Yes, I have,” the voice says, in a clipped, mocking tone.

“What is your right?”

“Her sexuality,” the voice groans, drawing out the consonants with a hiss. “I take all of their reproductive organs. Everyone gives to me.”

“How long have you tormented her?” Larry asks.

“Foreverrrr,” the voice says, breaking into a growl. “As long as I want to.”

“That ain’t the answer,” Larry interjects. “Do you want me to punish you?”

“No,” the voice says, growling again. “Noooooo.”

As he does many times on this April day, Larry calls on the angels of God to torment the demons with flaming swords until the spirits speak truthfully or depart altogether. After considerable interrogation, and after Larry repents on Ruth’s behalf for the sins that allowed this demon to take residence in her, the thing apparently leaves. Ruth bobs her head and exhales.

She plucks a tissue from the box and dabs a tear.

“I felt it leave,” Marion says, speaking for the first time. “Thank you, Jesus.”

 

In an excerpt from his new book, Why I am an Atheist Who Believes in God, Frank Schaeffer pulls no punches about how he approaches the message of Jesus:

Jesus certainly was not a “Bible believer,” as we use that term in the post Billy Graham era of American fundamentalist religiosity that’s used as a trade-marked product to sell religion. Jesus didn’t take the Jewish scriptures at face value. In fundamentalist terms, Jesus was a rule-breaking relativist who wasn’t even “saved,” according to evangelical standards. Evangelicals insist that you have to believe very specific interpretations of the Bible to be saved. Jesus didn’t. He undercut the scriptures.

The stories about Jesus that survived the bigots, opportunists and delusional fanatics who wrote the New Testament contain powerful and enlightened truths that would someday prove the undoing of the Church built in his name. Like a futurist vindicated by events as yet undreamed, Jesus’ message of love was far more powerful than the magical thinking of the writers of the book he’s trapped in. … Jesus believed in God rather than in a book about God. The message of Jesus’ life is an intervention in and an acceleration of the evolution of empathy.

In an interview about the book, Schaeffer unpacks what he means by its paradoxical title:

I do not always believe, let alone know, if God exists. I do not always know he, she, or it does not exist either, though there are long patches in my life when it seems God never did exist. What I know is that I see the Creator in Jesus or nowhere. What I know is that I see Jesus in my children and grandchildren’s love. What I know is that I rediscover hope again and again through my wife Genie’s love. What I know is that Mother Maria loved unto death. What I know is that sometimes something too good to be true, is true. …

Maybe we need a new category other than theism, atheism, or agnosticism that takes paradox and unknowing into account. I believe that life evolved by natural selection. I believe that evolutionary psychology explains away altruism and debunks love and that brain chemistry undermines my illusion of free will and personhood. I also believe that the spiritual reality hovering over, in, and through me calls me to love, trust, and hear the voice of my Creator.

One reviewer, an atheist, cautions that Schaeffer’s appropriation of the term isn’t exactly literal:

Frank sets forth a proposition in his book and it is this: Religious Fundamentalism sits on one side of his religious sweet spot, and Atheism sits on the other. Atheism is simply the co-evil twin of religious fundamentalism. He occasionally tries to back pedal from that premise and give some Atheists some credit; but it is clear Atheism brings to Frank a frustrated eye-roll. Which makes me wonder what prompted the use of the term Atheist in his title. He may be a theist who wavers on his opinion of who or what god is. He may be unclear as to whether humanity survives beyond the point of death, but none of those questions have anything to do with Atheism.

Reviewing Peter J. Leithart’s Gratitude: An Intellectual History, Wesley Hill looks back at the virtue’s ambiguous place in ancient societies:

Gratitude starts before the Christian era, with the ancient Greeks and Romans. A wealthy patron might offer a present to a friend, but such a favor wasn’t about establishing equality. On the contrary, the recipient of the gift was expected to demonstrate gratitude by returning the favor in a correspondingly concrete way. Greek and Roman moralists fretted over the elaborate maneuvering this system required. Aristotle and his followers suggested that return gifts should outshine their originals, allowing receivers to enjoy a certain independence. Meanwhile, Cicero and Seneca, the first-century Latin authors, counseled shrewdness. Better, they thought, to use the newly established patron-client relationship for one’s own advantage.

Demonstrating gratitude by giving return gifts was a way to climb the social ladder. If you heralded your patron’s generosity by publicly showing him your gratitude, you might stand a chance of benefitting from his gifts again in the future, and thus the cycle would be perpetuated. “Paganism did not have to learn gratitude from Christians,” Leithart concludes. “Paganism knew all about gratitude, the oppressions of gratitude included.”

Hill goes on to emphasize Leithart’s argument that Christianity changed what gratitude meant – and his call for “the church to reclaim its identity as a people of gratitude”:

All this was revolutionized when Jesus interrupted the dance of gift and return gift by focusing all the attention on the one divine Giver, the one whom Jesus called “Father.” “[T]he central theme of Jesus’ teaching on gift and reciprocity,” according to Leithart, “is the revelation of the Father as the generous Patron of all his children.”

What happens to the elaborate, delicately choreographed waltz of gifts and return gifts if benefactors can look to God rather than to their friends for any reciprocation they might need? If God is ultimately behind every gesture of generosity, then the rationale for lording it over others and enforcing servile relationships is undone. Suddenly the complicated dance becomes unnecessary. Opting out becomes a possibility. Benefactors don’t have to pressure their clients to return their gifts, and recipients don’t have to remain shackled to the expectations of their patrons. “The only debts [Christians] owe are to love one another and to give thanks to God.”