Job mettastasizes

I wrapped up my part of the current iteration of "Performing the Problem of Suffering: The Book of Job and the Arts" today talking mostly about Buddhism. (Next week students will share their final projects.) Some students have found the course too western- and monotheism-focused, a justifiable concern given the course title - though the subtitle explains why we've been doing what we've been doing. Still, it seemed appropriate to return to the larger questions I began the course with. What is the problem of suffering?

We began with a poem from the Man'yoshu, an ancient Japanese verse anthology, which I've thought somehow problem of suffering-related since I encountered it a very long time ago (during the year I spent at the Ethics Department of the University of Tokyo, 1992-93!). In the poem a poet recounts finding the body of a man washed up on the beach of an island which had a reputation as paradisaical, and laments his inability to inform the unknown man's wife of his fate. I distributed a copy of the poem and asked students to read it and write or draw a response. In the ensuing discussion, one student drew our attention to the way the poem moves from the third person to I, and then by way of we to you - first you the dead man, and his lost you, the wife who will never know what became of her husband - and the whole thing addressed to the you reading the poem, witnessing the poet's pain.

This time I used my old fave, Alice Walker's talk "Suffering too Insignificant for the Majority to See," as a way of exploring some Buddhist ways of performing the problem of suffering. The first was the famous "parable of the poisoned arrow"; the second was "metta" meditation. I decided I might as well lead into the poisoned arrow story by recalling Job's plaint, early in the Book of Job (6:4),

          For Shaddai’s arrows are all around me –
               my breath absorbs their venom –
               terror of the god invests me. (Scheindin translation)

The Buddha offers the tale of a person who refuses treatment for a poisoned arrow until he knows who the archer was, what the arrow was made of, etc., etc. in rebuffing the "unedifying" metaphysical questions of one Malunkyaputta. The point seems to be that metaphysical questions don't treat the true problem, which is suffering. The list of the man's questions is long and verges on the absurd. In any case, The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him. 

What might the Buddha say to Job? I invited students to consider this with a partner, and soon the room was abuzz. Wasn't the whole point of the Book of Job that demanding an accounting of suffering was right and just? Rehearsing Job's story helps us keep suffering a problem, warding off shallow explanations and the explicit or implicit view that all suffering is somehow deserved (a view common in Buddhism, too). Or is the theophany perhaps making the same point as the Buddha!

This was subversive enough, but adding metta to the mix took us farther still. Like the poem from the Man'yoshu, metta meditation extends concern for oneself in ever widening circles to include friends, acquaintances, adversaries and ultimately all sentient beings.

                              May I [s/he, they, all] be happy 
                              May I be safe 
                              May I be peaceful 
                              May I live with ease 

Alice Walker's talk uses metta to offer a way of facing a past of murderous oppression, healing the ancestors by remembering them... but also remembering their oppressors, who are ancestors, too. I wound up the class sharing Walker's metta-inspired ritual of remembrance, as powerful a performance of the problem of suffering as they come.

What I didn't get into was wondering what might happen were the Buddha, after having discussed the appropriate responses to being shot by venomous arrows, to have told Job about metta. In a way, Job experiences that widening of concern, discovering that suffering is so widespread as to raise questions about God's care for all people, not just his servant Job. But there's something in metta's expansion to include all beings without exception that left me with a challenging thought. Might Job's metta not extend all the way to heaven? And not just the satan. I remembered Archibald Macleish's Zuss' indignant response to J.B.'s answer to God:

                                               Then he calmed me!
                                               Gentled me the way a farmhand
                                               gentles a bulging, bugling bull! 

This might sound blasphemous but there's more of this in the monotheistic traditions than one might think. How powerful inter-religious dialogue can be, broadening our grasp of what matters, and deepening our appreciation for our own  as well as other traditions!

さくら

BBG Japanese Garden's gate makes the sakura into a scene from Ozu...

but other trees aren't content to sit in a frame!

Shorebird

To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and the flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.

Rachel Carson in her first book, Under the Sea-Wind (1941), quoted in Jill Lepore, "The Shorebird: Rachel Carson and the rising of the seas," in the March 26th issue of The New Yorker (with a different title online) 

Enviable

Through Poem-a-Day, which I sometimes check, I've discovered a delightful young poet named Chen Chen. The title of his first book, When I Grow Up, I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, gives a sense of his playful wisdom. The poem I first encountered him through, "I Invite my Parents to a Dinner Party," gives a sense of some of the topics he takes up as a Chinese-born gay American poet. Imagine my pleasure at discovering the second poem in his book is called "I am not a religious person but." (You can read it here.)

His lines are generally too long for the format of this blog, giddy cataracts of words, sentences spilling from one line to the next. They're full of wit and humor, joy and pathos, and mock- and not so mock seriousness. Impossible to excerpt! A line from a poem later in the book, "Ode to My Envy" (it comes right after "Elegy for My Sadness"), has stayed with me all day. It's the penultimate line in this chunk:


                                                                ... Every day I get 
increasingly envious of my friend who dresses more smartly.

Of my friend who's more political. Of my friend who says,
Oh, that's good enough, why am I stressing out? & means it
& stops stressing & is happy. I'm envious of my friend who's 
envious of me because he actually wants something I have.

I'm envious of those who learn Life Lessons from their envy. 
...

(Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2017), 39

Lived Abrahamic religion

These "Wishing Balls" by Manoël Pénicaud are part of one of a fun set of exhibitions called "Shared Sacred Sites." They're in the contemporary part (on display at the CUNY Graduate Center), and gather threads from Büyükada, an island off the coast of Turkey where pilgrims - mostly Muslim - come to pray at the Greek Orthodox church of St. George. Thousands unroll spools of thread as they ascend, an unbroken thread enhancing one's prayers' chance of coming true. (Pénicaud rescued these threads from being burnt the day after the saint's feast, along, presumably, with the detritus of models of houses and other prayer objects made of twigs and sugar cubes.) St. George for them may be an appearance of the immortal guide Khidr.
The exhibition introduces several sites around the Mediterranean where members of more than one Abrahamic faith come together - places of which I was unaware. I often tell students that ideas of exclusivist religion wouldn't have arisen in South or East Asia, where devotional practices and holy sites overlap, but I'll have to be more careful about generalizing. In the partner exhibit at the New York Public Library, with manuscripts, books and images of these sites, it's harder to detect this shared reality: it becomes some one tradition's narrative, at the expense of others'. But the videos and images at CUNY show places where the larger narratives are eclipsed by local practice and individual need: lived religion!

Just a week away

Fake truth won't set you free

The persistence of support for our pagan president by white evangelicals has become a topic of greater and greater interest. We've known about it for a while, but it seems to have deeper roots than other groups in his "base." (Support beyond the "paler born-again folk" minority, never high, continues to crater - much lower than averaged polls tell us.)

What's going on? It's tempting to accuse the white Evangelical base of hypocrisy for supporting a leader so evidently not living a life of Christian virtue; perhaps it's a religious veneer for patriarchal white supremacist nostalgia? I've been taking comfort in a study from the primaries, cited again when Roy Moore seemed headed for Washington, that the most fervent supporters are those who call themselves Evangelical but don't go to church much.

But this lets religion off the hook, and Christianity. I'm persuaded by a recent article by Hollis Phelps in Religion Dispatches that one can't just accuse these people of hypocrisy. The "narrative of the morally ambiguous, repulsive individual" used by God to do God's work is biblical: it recurs in the Bible (not just the in "Old Testament") so often that "covering over the 'darker' aspects of the faith for the sake of love, as more liberal Christians tend to do" should be condemned as a simplification, too. These wouldn't be the first Christians to claim biblical support for bigotry.
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This leaves me in an uncomfortable place. First, as a religious studies person I feel obliged to note that the very definition of religion as about love and morality rather than power and politics is problematic. Also as a religious studies person I feel that, though hypocrisy is no doubt real, religious self-identification needs to be taken seriously. If a large number of self-described X do something the textbooks tell me X don't do (like Catholics using birth control or approving of gay marriage) then it's time to revise the textbooks. And who's to say that church-going X are more truly X than those who do X at home?

But I'm uncomfortable also as a self-identified Christian. For a number of years now I've prayed the Our Father in church holding my hands face-up in front of me. Every time I do that I recall Christians unlike myself who pray that way - Evangelicals, I'm thinking - and try to feel solidarity with them. This is a habit from Anglicanism (by way of Rowan Williams). I'm aware that my own queer-friendly Christianity is no less a departure from tradition than their personal relationship with Jesus. Perhaps I hope that if I make space for them in my understanding of Christianity, they'll return the favor.

But this aspirational ecumenism has been getting harder over the past year, as surveys claim (though I continue to resist believing them) that the prez enjoys the unwavering faith of white Evangelicals. It reached a breaking point during Holy Week. At some point I found myself wondering if those who think God fights his culture war with guns and the bullying grifter in the White House might, in fact, not be Christians at all. Oblivious of theology they are validated in their judgments because Jesus tells them they're right. But is it Jesus who speaks to them that way, fueling their fears and stoking their rage? Until now I guess I've taken a benevolently skeptical view of those who claim to converse with Jesus - what harm does it do? But of late the harm question seems very real, and I found myself thinking they're either dangerously self-deluded ... or that it's someone else answering their prayers, not Jesus.

I've spent countless hours rebutting students' view that religion is all about judgment, about exclusion, separating the sheep from the goats, condemning the Other to hell. True religion is about humility and inclusion, the goodness of all God's creation! But perhaps sometimes judgment is appropriate. We "liberal Christians" need to be more humble, yes, but are Christians not called to defend the Gospel from "Good News that is fake," to quote an Evangelical?

I'm still working this out. Perhaps I need to learn to use the "powers and principalities" language of Stringfellow... And "religion" - maybe it's time to stretch my "religion is not nice" muscles a bit more again.

By any other name

Garden State glory-of-the-snow, trout lilies and Dutchman's breeches 

Atlantic northwest

Weekend outing... to Skylands, New Jersey's unexpected northwest!

Spring fling

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden's magnolias and many of the cherries are in full bloom. The Chinese witch hazel is a rush of delight, too. But it's a joy of another order to see the native plants garden coming to life - something I suppose only city people need a botanic garden for!

Robe-rug-walls

When new robes are received the old robes are used as coverlets, the old coverlets as mattress covers, the old mattress covers as rugs, the old rugs as dusters, and the old tattered dusters are kneaded with clay and used to repair cracked floors and walls.

These lines of Ananda to a King Udena celebrating the frugality and thrift of the early sangha are quoted in several works on Buddhism and ecology. Possibly from Vinaya II 291, we found them quoted in a chapter by Vijay Kumar Thakur in Ecology and Religion: Ecological Concepts in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Islam, Christianity and Sikhism, ed. Rajdeva Narayan and Janardan Kumar (New Delhi: Deep & Deep Publications, 2003), 60. Love the name of the publisher!

But it seems to me they might be about something more. Your relationship with a thing - a robe, in this instance - doesn't end when it ceases to function as that thing. What is now a rug was once a robe, just as what is now a robe will one day be part of a wall. You might not even know it in the particular case. It's kind of wonderful.

Now it doesn't make sense to say it is a robe throughout this whole sequence of functions and relationships, does it? Likewise, against the background of rebirth, it doesn't really make sense to understand any relationship solely in terms of the present form and function of the parties involved. Famously one should regard everyone one meets as once having been one's mother.

Deep & deep indeed, a challenge to the commodification of all relationships in "throwaway" consumer capitalist society...

Landmark

A building I pass all the time on the junket between school and the library at Washington Square Park had a crowd assembled in front of it today. Turns out the NYC Landmarks Preservation Center was unveiling a plaque commemo- rating that Edie Windsor, whose case won the right for LGBT people to marry in this land, had lived there. I lingered a while and heard Robbie Kaplan, the lead lawyer on Windsor's SCOTUS case and a close friend. She observed that this was the first Passover in years that her family had spent without Edie, who passed away last Fall. She reflected that it had long seemed unfair to her that Moses was not permitted to set foot in the promised land. Now she thinks that if all you've aimed to achieve has been accomplished before you die, you weren't aiming high enough.

I alone have escaped to tell you

In my course on the Book of Job and the arts today, it was time for Archibald Macleish's 1958 play "J. B." - my own introduction to Job, back at Torrey Pines High School all those years ago. (I was Messenger 2, as I recall.) Most of the students hadn't read it yet - their discussion sections are later in the week - so I tried to whet their appetites by exegeting some choice passages without giving away the whole story. This whole story is prefigured in a singsong we hear from Nickles, the washed-up actor turned circus popcorn seller who will go on to play the part of Satan.

NICKLES:    
I heard upon his dry dung heap
That man cry out who cannot sleep:
"If God is God he is not good,
If God is good He is not God;
Take the even, take the odd,
I would not sleep here if I could
Except for the little green leaves in the wood
And the wind upon the water.” (11)

The third and fourth lines have a life of their own in the literature on the Problem of Evil, but there's more here. Take the even, take the odd refers to J. B.'s acceptance of evil with the good. The next two lines, however, refer to his wife Sarah, who will ultimately try to kill herself, only to be stopped in her tracks by a new leaf (forsythia) growing in a ruined landscape. And the last line? It's complicated, and rich, I told them. There are references throughout the play to wind and water, as in the psychoanalyst-comforter Eliphaz's exquisite image for the ego's illusions of autonomy.

ELIPHAZ:   
Science knows now that the sentient spirit 
Floats like the chambered nautilus on a sea 
That drifts it under skies that drive:                                     
Beneath, the sea of the subconscious, 
Above the winds that wind the world. 
Caught between that sky, that sea, 
Self has no will, cannot be guilty. (122)

But of course wind upon the water is also a reference to the very beginning of Genesis, when the spirit moved on the water, to the world human beings love into being despite the terrors and trials of existence, to the endless consternation of the Nickles and Eliphazes, Bildads and Zophars, Marxes and Freuds and Becketts.

J.B.:                           
                   He does not love. He  
Is. 
                 
SARAH:               
        But we do. That’s the wonder. (152)

 I hope the students find the time to savor this magnificent play!

Landschaft

It'd been such a long time since last I was in the part of Germany where my mother grew up that I had forgotten what it looks like. Indeed, inspired by self-mocking stories of the Ochtruper Berg, Ochtrup's diminutive 60m "mountain" and the proximity of Holland, I'd been picturing pancake-flat landscapes from Dutch paintings! In fact there are rolling hills and woods; nearby Bad Bendheim even has a proper castle on an impressive rocky rise. In early Spring, as now, the tilled fields are blankets of bright green, and gauzy sprays of new leaf make the lower trees on forest edges a pale yellow. Forsythias and magnolias offer splashes of brighter color. This picture, taken taken from the train my misty last morning, doesn't quite capture it but it's pretty enough.

Our town

This is where I've been keeping the last few days, the town of Ochtrup b/ Münster i/ W (as it was inscribed on the case of my German grandfather). The town center is dominated by the neogothic spires of St. Lambertus, represented here on a glazed tile in the paved sidewalk leading from the old textile factory (now a booming outlet center) to the town center (hollowed out, in no small part, by said outlet center). What took me to St. Lamberti was my god-father's funeral, a beautiful mass in a church dear to him his whole life. May he rest in peace.

JFK --> Dublin --> Amsterdam --

and then two hours on the train to the German town where my mother grew up, where her brother - my godfather - is being laid to rest.

New look

Our resolutely unbeautiful college cafe has opened. Its predecessor was all reds and ochers. I guess it's supposed to be pure container, white and light, with students providing the color. The jumbled back wall is the "radical reading list" put together by a student group, which makes the area by the coffee shop more fun and a little less, well, abstract.