As Jesus and the disciples continued on their way to Jerusalem, they came to a certain village where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. Her sister, Mary, sat at the Lord’s feet, listening to what he taught. But Martha was distracted by the big dinner she was preparing. She came to Jesus and said, “Lord, doesn’t it seem unfair to you that my sister just sits here while I do all the work? Tell her to come and help me.”
But the Lord said to her, “My dear Martha, you are worried and upset over all these details! There is only one thing worth being concerned about. Mary has discovered it, and it will not be taken away from her.”
Luke 10:38-42 (NLT)
Every time I teach the Mary and Martha story I feel uncomfortable because I think it’s unfair to Martha.
Jesus and the disciples didn’t come with food. Neither did Jesus tell the disciples to prepare the meal so Mary and Martha could both listen to him. They arrived expecting food and in their culture women were expected to prepare and serve it. The disciples didn’t have jobs when they followed Jesus but relied on the charity and hospitality of people they met on their travels, which were all by foot. There’s a good chance they were hungry, and possibly hangry when they arrived at Martha’s house. It would have been a lot of work to prepare food for over a dozen hungry/hangry men, making everything from scratch with no refrigeration or machines to help you.
None of these are trifling details.
Also, I tend to be a Martha, preparing food for gatherings of people (unless my mother is also at the gathering, because she has perfected the skill of slipping away and doing everything), so I’m inclined to be sympathetic to her.
I’ve been able to approach the story by seeing Martha’s problem as being bitter about being stuck in the kitchen. If Martha had been joyful about preparing the food and was able to say generously, “I hope Mary remembers everything Jesus says so she can tell me later,” then all would have been fine.
But I was recently preparing the story for another leader to tell it and I experienced it in a new way, as about pursuing the approval of Jesus.
Trying to impress Jesus
It’s not hard to imagine Martha working away, sweeping the floors, chopping and mixing and hustling between the house and oven in the courtyard, and lifting more big ceramic jars out of storage, calculating the amount of food and number of guests, thinking to herself,
“Jesus will be so impressed at the table I’m setting for him and the disciples. He’s always so happy to come to my house. I always put out such a great spread. He can always count on my welcome.”
At some point, she becomes worried that her own work won’t be enough to make the right impression.
“Where is Mary? Why isn’t she helping? She can’t expect me to put out our usual abundant spread all on my own.”
She peeks into the main room and sees Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus.
“All this work I’m putting in to make sure that Jesus is happy, and Mary’s doing nothing! Jesus will back me up. After all, how else will all these men get fed?”
Martha craves the words of approval and thanks she gets from Jesus when they are together. Who wouldn’t? But Mary’s the one who gets Jesus’ words of praise and approval. For doing nothing but listening.
This made me think of the story of Jesus’ baptism, when God’s said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17 NIV). Jesus had done nothing in his ministry yet. Not a blessed thing. And still God was well pleased with him.
Martha’s problem wasn’t as much that she was doing, doing, doing as that she was doing, doing, doing to make Jesus well pleased with her. Kind of like how obeying biblical Law isn’t a problem in itself, but basing your entire faith practice and the worth of people on how strictly they follow the Law is a problem (see all of Jesus’ comments about Pharisees and religious people).
Those are not what impress Jesus.
What impresses Jesus
Do you crave his voice? Are you listening to him? No matter what else you do or don’t do, that will always be the right choice.
If only you would listen to his voice today!
Psalm 95:7b
And, as if speaking to Martha’s becoming-bitter heart, this is the beginning of the next verse:
The Lord says, “Don’t harden your hearts…
Psalm 95:8a
As a do-er, Martha is a continual cautionary tale for me. I know the difference between work that I do for Jesus that flows out of love and generosity and work that morphs into bitterness because I’m just working so hard all on my own and nobody is noticing but everyone is expecting me to do it. And that pesky trying-to-work-out-my-own-salvation thing, that trying-to-DO-my-way-into-Jesus’-approval thing is there, too.
Dr. John Perkins once said at my former church,
“I’m about to overcome my working for salvation.”
And he was 89. He’d just recovered from cancer treatment. Not to mention the fact that he was tortured and beaten to within an inch of his life by white police officers yet refused to give in to bitterness and hatred and has been working and preaching for racial reconciliation in the Christian church for decades (15 honorary degrees, 18 books published). He’s just now about to overcome working for his salvation.
So I’m in good company. Recovering Marthas, you’re in good company, too. Let’s keep on being made uncomfortable by this story so we, too, will get closer and closer to overcoming the need to work for our salvation. Jesus offers it. We just have to say yes, and listen.
I’ve been writing this post in my head for years. Even before 2020, when the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) made having pre-marital sex an excommunicable offense.
According to the denomination I grew up in, consensual sex between two adults who are not married to each other or to anyone else threatens their salvation. It is “incompatible with obedience to the will of God as revealed in Scripture.” Moreover, anyone who believes that consensual sex between unmarried adults might not be a sin is in a confessional-level violation of church teaching. In simpler words, they consider issues of sexual ethics something that proper Christians cannot disagree about, so anyone who disagrees with their interpretation can be booted out.
That “anyone” is me. But they can’t boot me out because I’ve already left.
I am nobody’s property
The church typically points at Exodus 22 and Deuteronomy 22:13-30 to support their ban on consensual sex between unmarried adults. Deuteronomy, especially, goes through a great many sexual offenses and details the punishments for each–usually execution. Yes, the punishment for not being a virgin when you get married, committing adultery, and being raped and not yelling loud enough to bring help is all execution. (Most conservative Christians interpret their way out of these punishments and do not consider execution to be a requirement, so they are able to see things in the Bible as culturally specific and not applying to our time period.)
The punishment for a man who seduces a girl who has not yet had sex is to pay the full bride price for a virgin to the father and marry the girl; or if the father refuses the marriage, to pay him the full bride price for a virgin.
Because what that seducer has done is damage the father’s property and affected the economic prospects of the father and the marriage prospects of the girl.
Happily, women are no longer considered property, and in most of the Western world at least, virginity is neither an economic factor in nor a barrier to marriage. Even in the Christian Reformed Church, engaged couples no longer have to appear before the congregation to confess and ask forgiveness for “anticipating their vows,” like my grandparents did in the 1930s.
Rules that are based on women’s status as property are as unnecessary to me as any biblical rules about persons as property. In other words, most Western Christians agree that slavery is wrong, and no longer see the Bible’s rules about how to treat slaves as applicable. I think I can be a faithful person and apply the same interpretation to Old Testament rules about sexual ethics. I could be wrong. I choose to live in the tension.
I am not married and neither is my partner
But what about the 7th commandment: “You shall not commit adultery”? That’s where the CRC gets its prohibition on every kind of sex that isn’t one man married to one woman. For all the things in the Bible that aren’t clear (see the following section), adultery has a clear definition: voluntary sex between a married person and a person who is not his or her spouse. The commandment is about breaking covenant and violating a promise made before God. I’ve got no argument with that. God is all about keeping covenant and promises and I want to be, too.
But neither I nor my partner of 6 years are married. So we cannot be committing adultery. Trying to make that verse about all unmarried sex is pushing it.
What about all those verses against sexual immorality?
Indeed, God does not approve of sexual immorality. But the Bible does not give a complete definition. It could mean only things most societies still consider wrong: incest, child abuse, rape, ritual temple sex, bestiality, adultery. Or it could include any sex outside of 1-man-1-woman marriage. We cannot know for sure.
I talk with God about this, and I plan ask him when I meet him. But for now, I choose not to interpret those verses as broadly as other Christians do. I’m going to live in the tension.
It is something obedient Christians can disagree about
So sometimes I choose to be what others would consider a little heretical. And I don’t buy that it affects my salvation. God has promised that my salvation is sure because it is the result of what Jesus did, not of what I do (other than believe in what Jesus did).
It is, in fact, very Reformed of me to believe that my record of sins has been replaced by Jesus’ record of righteousness: “For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ” (2 Cor. 5:21).
***
If you want to read a playful short story about that very Reformed idea (that has fancy names like imputed righteousness and justification by faith), wherein Isaiah tries to represent me in the Court of Heaven:
“Plow up the hard ground of your hearts! Do not waste your good seed among thorns. O people … surrender your pride and power.”
Jeremiah 4:2-3 NLT
This has been my prayer for many years. It’s a tough one because it leads to discomfort. It means that I’ll eventually have to admit that I’m wrong, that I do not always choose to do or say the right thing, that I need to forgive people who have wronged me, that I do not know everything, that I am not the center of the world. I will have to change. And I’m sad a lot because the state of the world affects me. And it’s a tough one because the world seems to reward people who’ve let their hearts grow hard against anyone unlike them.
We live in an age of trolls–people who attack those they disagree with in horribly personal ways, threatening them with violence or telling them they deserve violence. Friends have shared a little bit of the trolling they’ve received and it’s upsetting and scary. We are governed by a Troll in Chief who relishes name calling and threats of violence–and millions of people cheer him on, including people who profess the same faith I do. Whole TV channels are devoted to people yelling at each other from their own little boxes, reiterating the same self-satisfied points, the same outrage over things nobody should be outraged about.
And these days a hardened heart feels so dangerous. Is so dangerous. Racism comes from a heart hardened against people with a different skin color and has been codified into a system that is bound and determined to keep its power and is threatened by truth and facts.
However, because of coronavirus, we are all feeling more vulnerable. Most of us are taking everyday actions designed to keep others safe–masks keep people safer from those with asymptomatic COVID-19, we’ve been staying home and not seeing our friends and loved ones, especially if they have any kind of health condition. People all over the world do a 7:00pm noisy cheer for their medical teams. Show many of us a story about exhausted medical workers or anyone who does anything remotely kind for someone else and we get a little teary. Or a lot teary.
And then three unarmed African Americans were killed (Ahmaud Aubery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd) in short order, and two of those killings were filmed, and two were by police, and it scraped against our already-vulnerable hearts and became unbearable–unbearable for those who experience racism, unbearable for those who understand how deep the tentacles of systemic racism reach, and even unbearable for people with a vested interest in the myth that they are not racist but how dare black people make uppity demands for freedom from danger in their own country. Nobody can turn away from what is happening; we can disagree about what they see, but we can’t turn away.
Which makes this a unique opportunity.
Our hearts feel thoroughly plowed up. Even for those who would deny it, their actions reveal how raw they are feeling.
The more we pay attention to the peaceful protesters, to those who have long been working towards a society with real justice for all, and to those who bring the energy and passion of youth to that work, and ignore the siren call of being more outraged by violence to buildings than we are by violence to persons, the better the chance that we’ll take advantage of those plowed-up hearts and really listen, and really talk about the deeper issues of systemic racism.
The more white Christians pay attention to biblical calls to live with truth, mercy, justice, and take care of the orphans, widows, and strangers within our gates, and the more we remember that it is the most basic action of Christian faith to admit that we are wrong and to ask forgiveness, the better the chance that we’ll really listen and really talk.
Frederick Douglass said,
“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground…. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle.”
Our cultural ground and our hearts are all plowed up. But that’s only step one in producing good fruit. There’s a lot more work to be done.
Oh I hope and I pray that we take advantage of it. I hope and I pray that white America really listens and gives up its pride and power and that there’s real change. I don’t know that I’m exactly hopeful, but I’ve seen more white people talking about systemic racism in ways they haven’t before. Maybe this time it will make a difference.
My husband and I recently went to Detroit, and toured a powerful art installation called The Heidelberg Project.
In 1967, 12-year-old Tyree Guyton watched his city burn. In the aftermath of the Detroit riots, thriving communities rapidly became segregated urban ghettos characterized by poverty, neglect and despair.
In 1986, Guyton took a stand against the decay, crime and apathy in the neighborhood where he was raised. Using discarded objects from everyday life, he created a festival of color and meaning that has been described as a “Ghetto Guggenheim.” Using vacant lots and abandoned houses as his canvas, he transformed an entire block into a world-famous outdoor art environment and a thought-provoking statement on the plight of inner city communities.
As we walked around the couple of blocks, my attention kept being drawn by all the painted clock faces: different shapes and sizes, each with a different time painted on it, some alone, some in groups, nailed up to and painted on and leaning against every kind of surface, right-side-up and sideways and upside-down.
clocks against a wall at The Heidelberg Project
My husband walked up to the artist and asked him about it. Being an artist, Guyton answered in more questions.
What time is it? Where are you in time?
3 clocks at the Heidelberg Project
Guyton has been studying Plato and Albert Einstein and their writing about time.
Time is energy. It’s all about energy. What has time done to you?
clock at the Heidelberg Project
As we walked, the same phrases played over and over in my mind:
It’s always time.
The time is now.
The time is now to do whatever it is that you so want to do. The time is now to seek change, whether personal or societal. It’s always time to do something that needs to be done.
And on a more personal level, the time is now to put in the work to realize my writing dreams. I need to put in the time.
God clock at the Heidelberg Project
And this one. This one cuts me to the quick.
O Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever? How long will you look the other way? How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul, with sorrow in my heart every day? How long will my enemy have the upper hand?
(Psalm 13:1-2, NLT)
Because this is/was a forgotten neighborhood, and represents all the other neighborhoods abandoned by the powers that be. When will it be their time?
So, for me, the clock faces were rallying cry and lamentation, plea and accusation.
What is it time to do in your life? In your corner of the world?
I recently heard a sermon about Joseph and Potiphar’s wife that focused on how Joseph dealt with his sexual desire for Potiphar’s wife — he refused to act on it because it would be a sin against God, and when pressed, he fled. A fine message about how to deal with desire for someone you shouldn’t have sex with. With one problem. Nowhere in the passage does it mention that Joseph felt desire for Potiphar’s wife.
True confessions: instead of listening with my full attention to the sermon, I was thinking about how I’d characterize what the story was really about.
This is the first story of Joseph after his brothers faked his death and sold him to slave traders, who sold him to Potiphar, the captain of the Pharaoh’s palace guard in Egypt. Joseph quickly became Potiphar’s favorite, because everything he did succeeded. So Potiphar gave him more and more responsibility until Joseph was running the entire household, and Potiphar “didn’t have a worry in the world, except to decide what he wanted to eat” (Genesis 39:6, NLT).
After Joseph started running the household, the Bible tells us that Potiphar’s wife began to desire Joseph, and “invited him to sleep with her” (39:7). Oh, to have more details. Is “invited” the best translation of whatever that ancient word is? An invitation takes place between equals. It’s a hospitality word. It makes me imagine it as part of the day’s rundown of household work: “I’m craving fig cakes, so make sure we have enough. My favorite tunic is getting thin, so I need more flax. Get me some purple thread. I have a palace event to go to and my robes need more embroidery. And, if you have time, take care of me in bed, as well.”
Whether it’s the correct translation or not, there remains the fact that Joseph and Potiphar’s wife are not equals. She owns him. He may be spoken of as Potiphar’s slave, and he may be running the entire household, but the fact remains that Joseph belonged to the household, and as the woman of the household, she owned him. As a slave, he had no right to determine what happened to him. His owners got to dictate everything about his day and his night. And you better believe that Joseph never forgot that fact — he used to be free to do as he wished, even more so than his brothers, since he was the favorite and coddled son, and now he was a slave. God was blessing the work he did, but he was still a slave, subject to the whims of his owners.
So Potiphar’s wife’s “invitation” had the weight of her power over him behind it. Which makes it terrifying, not attractive; an occasion for fear, not desire. This isn’t a pleasant seduction, and it doesn’t really matter how attractive she may or may not have been. If he does what she demanded of him (let’s drop the whole “invitation” charade), then he’d be violating the trust of his owner, who would then be free to do anything to him — throw him in jail, cut off the offending member, kill him. So he refuses. She continues to pressure him, day after day, and he tries to avoid her. Until one day, when nobody else is around, she grabs his shirt and demands that he do the deed. He runs away, leaving his shirt behind. She cries rape, and Joseph is thrown into jail without a chance to defend himself. All his responsibilities and all his success gave him no advantage, because he was a slave.
I have another reason for recognizing that the situation is not one of desire on Joseph’s part: I’ve been Joseph. Not so dramatically, thankfully, but with enough resonance that I could empathize with him.
In my 20s, I worked for a stockbroker. I started out as a temp, doing basic data entry, but when they discovered the depth of my administrative skills, I was given more and more involved tasks to do, until I was working as an assistant for a newly-hired stockbroker. He was less than ten years older than me, fairly established in his career (or as established as anyone in that highly volatile field can be). He’d been fired from his previous employer, under some kind of cloud, and the previous employer was trash-talking him to his clients and trying to make sure his clients didn’t move with him to the new firm. Things were in flux, so I had a desk in his office. I ghost-wrote beautiful, heartfelt letters to his clients that helped convince them to move with him to the new firm. Anything he gave me to do, I did it, quickly and very well. He could count on me, so he gave me more and more responsibility. I was hired on full-time.
And then it started. If he had to show me something, he’d pull his chair up right next to mine until our arms or legs were touching; if I scootched away, he’d pull my chair back until we were touching again. If he had to pass me in a doorway or hallway, he’d brush up against me. He’d talk about my hair or my clothes in very flattering ways. After one letter that meant two extremely wealthy clients would stay with him, he kissed me on the top of my head. He called me endearing terms with more affection than he exhibited when he spoke about his wife. He made a point of mentioning that he had an empty apartment on the upper east side. He was attractive and fit. He praised my work effusively. He was rich.
Did I feel desire for him? No.
Discomfort and anxiety, yes. Sure, the early compliments were nice and I was flattered by his praise of my work, but once the rest of it started up, even the compliments made my stomach twist. His actions towards me were expressions of his power over me as his employee. I experienced them as coercion, not invitation. I was not remotely tempted to take him up on his implied offer.
I tried what Joseph tried, just keeping away from him, keeping my distance. But he was my boss, and I wanted to keep the job, so there was only so much I could do. I put up with it for not even 3 months before leaving — letting them know exactly why I was leaving and getting some “severance” pay for my troubles. Because I was an employee and not a slave, I had rights.
Joseph was not so lucky. God used it all for glory, but those weeks (or however long it was) when Potiphar’s wife was hounding him had to be full of anxiety, if not outright fear. He was not fighting desire for a woman — he was fighting to keep his position and his life. In some ways, though, Joseph was lucky: he was a man. A female slave in that situation didn’t have the option of “no.” She’d be raped and tossed aside when she became inconvenient — think of Hagar, “given” to Abraham and then cast out into the desert with her young son. Heck, even wives didn’t have the option of “no” — think of Sarah, told to masquerade as Abraham’s sister and entering the households of a couple of foreign kings (and what was asked of her there?) because Abraham was afraid they’d kill him if they knew she was his wife.
So I submit that the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife is only about sex on the surface. Underneath, it’s really about power and powerlessness, coercion and fear.
John the Baptist Preaching, by Giambattista Tiepolo
I’ve been telling the Baptism of Jesus story in children’s worship for years. It’s one of my favorites, with the cool flap in the blue felt river that lets you dunk Jesus and have him come up in the middle of the water. But until recently, it had been years since I read the actual biblical account.
There was something unexpected in the “grown-up version” in Matthew (3:7, NLT): Pharisees and Sadducees came to John the Baptist to be baptized.*
Not to interview him to complete their committee report on New Religious Movements. Or to hang back and gather evidence to convince their colleagues to start a committee to investigate religious extremism.
To be baptized. Why?
The Pharisees and Sadducees, as we know them from the New Testament, are debaters of minute differences in the law and purveyors of punitive interpretations. John the Baptist certainly lays into them when he sees them in his crowd:
“You brood of snakes!” he exclaimed, “Who warned you to flee God’s coming judgment? Prove by the way you live that you have really turned from your sins and turned to God. Don’t just say, ‘We’re safe — we’re the descendants of Abraham.’ That proves nothing. God can change these stones here into children of Abraham. Even now the ax of God’s judgment is poised, ready to sever your roots. Yes, every tree that does not produce good fruit will be chopped down and thrown into the fire.” (Matt. 3:7-10, NLT, my emphasis)
So why would those Pharisees and Sadducees come to be baptized by this man who eats bugs and lives out in the wilderness? We think of them as so sure of their own righteousness that they are bossy about everyone else’s. Why would they heed the call? Wouldn’t they be more likely to be suspicious of such an extreme character as John the Baptist?
As an average reader of the Bible, I pretty much equated them. But to each other, they had deep theological disputes. General consensus seems to be that Sadducees were upperclass political and religious conservatives. They only took as authoritative the laws written in the Torah and they took them literally. They focused on maintaining Temple rituals and serving in the Grand Sanhedrin, the group that interpreted civil and religious law for the Israelites.
The Pharisees also served in the Grand Sanhedrin, but were theologically looser than the Sadducees (even writing that seems funny). They took not only the written law as authoritative, but also oral law — things they believed God said to Moses about how to apply the Torah (these were later written down and form the Talmud). Unlike the Sadducees, they believed in an after-life that rewarded the good and punished the wicked, and in a messiah who would bring about world peace.
The main thing that connects them, and connects their negative treatment in the New Testament, is their obsession with the law, as if keeping the law in and of itself would make them right with God. It reminds me a little of when a person hears about something bad happening to someone else (robbery, cancer, physical attack) and they want to know all the details of how it happened — mostly so they can determine that they don’t do any of those things, and can therefore believe they are “safe.” As if doing X and avoiding Y or being a child of Abraham is guaranteed to keep you “safe.”
So what would draw these legalists to the waters?
Did they think John the Baptist was one of them? That he was a fellow strict applier of the law who was taking the rules about the need for ritual purification in fresh/running water more seriously than even they did? That what he was doing was one layer of conscientiousness above praying loudly on the street corners, so they needed to step up their game and come out to be baptized? Did they come out of fear, thinking that if they didn’t cover this base, they wouldn’t be right with God? Or was going to get baptized by John the 30s equivalent of slapping on a WWJD wrist band (1990s) or talking about “back-masking” and burning your rock and roll albums (1980s)?
But wait, there’s more. There was a third group around at this time, the Essenes. Here’s how the Jewish Virtual Library characterizes them:
A third faction, the Essenes, emerged out of disgust with the other two. This sect believed the others had corrupted the city and the Temple. They moved out of Jerusalem and lived a monastic life in the desert, adopting strict dietary laws and a commitment to celibacy.
We don’t know whether John the Baptist was an Essene at any point, but there are enough similarities between them that the Pharisees and Sadducees may have associated him with the sect. So why would a Pharisee or Sadducee come penitently to a Essene-like person?
I think the simplest answer is the most plausible: they were not all the same.
While the cultures of the Pharisees and Sadducees each seem homogeneous, some individuals probably knew that God wanted obedience more than sacrifices, knew that the wise person was the teachable person, and could recognize God nudging them to change, even if that nudge came in an unexpected package. These keepers of the law could not all be religious bullies.
Think for a moment of any group that espouses a doctrine you disagree with hot-heartedly. Are all the members of that group the same? Is there anything redeeming about a particular individual you can think of in that group? Is there something you can learn from anyone in that group? I think of a minister who, in the early 1990s, published a number of articles and letters against women holding all church offices in the Christian Reformed Church. I was saying unflattering things about him one night when one of my friends noted that her parents either knew him or went to his church, and that this man had a powerful prayer ministry. She had specific examples that are lost in the sands of time, but I remember having to stop on a dime and realize that someone I vehemently disagreed with could have something to teach me.
So what can we learn from the Pharisees and Sadducees?
My humble suggestion: that it’s important to know the Word of God and to let it permeate your life. After all, Jesus did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it (Matt. 5:17-20). Knowledge of the Word is not sufficient to keep us right with God, but there’s a world of richness in the Bible that even a life-long believer can be continually discovering and being changed by. I’m certainly finding that.
Without wanting to seek knowledge of the Word for myself, I never would have read that some Pharisees and Sadducees came to the water to be baptized. I’m glad I know that. I find it hopeful that the urge to listen to and to follow God goes deeper than our theological arguments, deeper than our theological assumptions, and did even way back then.
* Matthew is the only one to identify those men as coming to be baptized. Luke records the same “You brood of snakes” speech that Matthew does, but says that it was given to “the crowds.” I should also note that my print version of the New Living Translation is one of few translations that makes this positive claim. The Biblegateway.com NLT has the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to watch John baptize; the NIV has them coming to where he was baptizing; the NRSV has them coming for baptism; The Message has them coming to be baptized because it was the popular thing to do. Fascinating, the difference word choice makes.
This post was originally going to be about jealousy and stupidity and a long-overdue apology. You see, I like to think of myself as supportive of my fellow writers. If you are a friend, and you have a blog, I will not only read it, but most of the time, I’ll let you know I read it. I try to encourage my writer friends, commiserate with them. But I’ve been in possession of a slim volume of short stories for over a year, stories written by one of my favorite cousins, Rodney Hart. I bought it as an ebook the first day it came out, so at first my excuse was that I didn’t like reading on my iPad. But then he gave me a physical copy. Still nothing.
What’s worse is that it wasn’t accidental. I avoided them. Out of stupid jealousy. Because here I’d been writing with the dream/goal of publication for years, submitting work and getting rejected over and over, and he quits his job and within several months, self-publishes a collection of short stories.
I’m not proud of my jealousy, but I can’t hide from it, either. So I apologize to Rod, here in public: sorry I was such an idiot.
And then this week I got sick of myself (this is so often my motivator) and finally read RockNRoll Shorts: Tales From a Local Musician’s Road. Most stories are vignettes from the lives of gigging rock and roll musicians, with band fights and money woes and grimy bars and the transporting community-making power of music. There are some great moments, like in “Rednecks and Soul,” about an African-American singer-songwriter playing in a redneck bar; Marceau’s interactions with a bar customer he calls “Party Naked” (because that’s what it says on his shirt) are really great, both funny and classy. The story made me want to hear Marceau play. This is a great description from “Lost Dead and Saved”:
They grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, a sludgy river town Mark Twained to death with no music scene and coffee shops as the only venues.
Love that. And this reminds me of a hundred similar conversations with musicians, from “Lost Dead and Saved”:
“You know, ‘Reeked of Death’ would be a great band name,” Vinnie said, and Benny smacked him upside the head in honor of Mush.
But then there’s the story that hijacked my planned post about writerly jealousy, “Beautiful Night to Relive.” It details several days Rod spent camping on my parents’ beach a few months after his mother died suddenly and unexpectedly. My aunt was a bright spark of a woman, genuinely delighted in so many things, a writer of stories for her grandchildren, an encourager extraordinaire. She was only a few months from retirement and the freedom to visit her kids and grandkids as often and for as long as they all wanted. And he never got to say good-bye.
In the story, he’s sitting on the deck when he first hears her voice:
“Is this the place that’s going to save me?” she sang, and the wind was her mirrored symphony, and for the first time since her funeral, I wept.
The next time, it’s when he can’t sleep, and he’s counting “the seconds between the waves”:
“It’s a beautiful night to relive,” she sang.
I opened up the tent to look around. I started back toward the steps, and there she was, slowly descending without walking, a light behind her and a sound of a symphony in front of her.
“It’s a beautiful night to give back what you get,” she sang. She got near the bottom of the steps, and her face had a wide goofy grandma smile, and her arms were extended. “Beautiful,” she sang, and the chorus behind her intensified.
I started to walk toward her, and she held out her arms, and I was just a few feet from her.
Then she was gone, and the silence thundered in my ears, and I stood motionless for what seemed like hours.
I can see this.
There are more sightings, more singing, some words of wisdom. There’s a conversation that I loved between him and my brother. Even some humor at the end about her directional impairment. But mostly, it’s a deep and good story about grief and loneliness and facing loss — and how amazing a place a Lake Michigan beach is.
The thing is, he’s not the only one in the family who’s seen a loved one after they died.
Given that we grew up in the rather heady Christian Reformed faith and, as a clan, are not generally given to emotional displays, we’re not who you’d think would be open to seeing those who’ve passed on. But we are.
When I was 9 or 10, I saw my Opa (Dutch for grandfather) who’d died the previous year. I was sleeping over at my cousin Esther’s house and woke up some time in the very early morning, when there was a haze of light coming through the curtains — her pink curtains, in her pink room, with the pink shag carpeting. And then there was my Opa, standing at the foot of my bed, canted forward slightly at the waist, as was his way. He made a calming gesture, not quite a wave. It was weird, but I wasn’t afraid. I was comforted.
I mentioned it to Esther in the morning, and when she said she’d seen it, too, I got huffy about her wanting to be a copycat, and not wanting me to have an experience she didn’t. (Those of you with a same-gender cousin almost exactly your age might recognize the competitiveness that can coexist with cousinly friendships.) I hadn’t even been particularly close to my Opa. I’d been living in Australia for the 3 years before he died, although I’d seen him the month before when we’d flown back to Canada for Christmas.
In fact, I forgot about the Esther-aspect of the story until she was sick with cancer and started talking to others about having seen Opa. We were much better friends as adults, so we could talk about it as a shared experience. A warm and loving experience. Made extra poignant because Esther was, herself, dying. This viewing became so widely known and openly discussed in the family that just a few weeks ago, Esther’s father was telling a story about something else that happened at that house, and my dad said, “You know, that house where you and Esther saw Opa.”
At least one member of my father’s generation has seen a departed loved one, as well, but that person hasn’t told me the full story (although I’d love to hear it some day), so I can’t detail it here.
And I know that at least one person was hoping that Esther would take inspiration from her Opa and visit those who ache from missing her. But to my knowledge, she hasn’t.
While I’m not generally into paranormal stuff (I didn’t even go through a ouija board phase as a teenager), I can’t deny my experience. Nor can I deny Rod and Esther’s experiences. Sure, one could say that my aunt’s appearances were manifestations of his need for closure after her death, but plenty of people say belief in God is irrational and ridiculous, and I believe in God with my whole heart and mind.
So I’m left loving that story of my aunt on the beach, encouraging her grieving son, and I’m glad he could be with her one more time.
How about you? Any good ghost stories? I’d love to hear them, whether comforting or confusing.
Also, I would like some kind of credit for not using the phrase, “I see dead people,” anywhere in this piece.
So I’ve been participating in these Five Minute Friday posts (prompted by Lisa-Jo Baker), and today’s word is broken. I want to keep up with this habit, this community, but I also have something else that’s been bugging me, so bear with me as I go a bit past 5 minutes.
Sometimes I want to break up with the Bible.
I come to the Bible a broken person. I have a sinful, selfish mind that can grab onto technicalities and blow little things out of proportion. More than that, I’m a specifically broken person, with my own experiences and my own hang-ups (as a result of those experiences), my own expectations. Even more than that, I’m a hurt person, a hurting person. I bring those hurts and (sometimes secret) fears to my reading.
This is partially why I’m reading the Bible through from beginning to end: no more picking only my favorite parts, no more focusing only on the fun passages, the passages that support what I already think and believe. This has meant dragging myself through Numbers (why, oh why repeat each set of numbers twice?!?), but also meant discovering gems of passages I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
Right now I’m reading Ezekiel. That is one weird book of the Bible. God really puts some of his prophets through the ringer. It starts with a fantastical vision of strange beings with wings and wheels and multiple faces and God giving Ezekiel a scroll of funeral dirges and pronouncements of dooms and making him eat it. Actually chew and swallow it (don’t worry, it tasted as sweet as honey). But within the weirdness is this:
“You must give them my messages whether they listen or not….And whether they listen or not — for remember, they are rebels — at least they will know they have had a prophet among them” (Ez. 2:7, 5, NLT).
I am not a prophet and I have no plans to ever go around calling myself Prophet Natalie. But God puts things on my heart to say, to write. And that passage tells me to say and to write them whether people respond or not, because my responsibility is to give the message that God has given/does give/is giving me, to use the voice God has given me. It’s not my job to fuss about how many readers I have or to despair because people don’t seem to be listening. It’s my job to speak. I am encouraged by this. It sets me free.
Ezekiel has to pull some crazy stunts (although God goes back on his request that Ezekiel defile his food by cooking it over human dung patties). I tend to approach these as God doing the equivalent of making a viral video: he’s having his prophet pull a public stunt that people will see and just have to talk about with people at the market, at the threshing field, on the roads (see Ez. 5 & 12).
“Did you hear what Ezekiel did this time?”
“Can’t be crazier than when he shaved his head and beard and divided it into thirds and burned part, scattered part, and slashed part.”
“Why did he do that again?”
“To show what will happen to Jerusalem because we’re ‘so rebellious.’ What was it now?”
“He packed his stuff, dug a hole in the wall, and walked away with his hands over his face. Says we’ll all be in exile, never to return, even Zedekiah.”
God will use anything to get his people to listen, even our love of gossiping about something crazy that someone did. I can appreciate that.
But then Ezekiel 16 has a disturbing metaphor about Israel as an abandoned female baby that God cleaned and cared for and raised and then married, but the wife/Israel trusted in her fame and beauty and gave herself as a prostitute to every man/country that came along. The wife/Israel used the gifts God gave her and turned them into idols and gifts for idols and gifts to all her lovers. The story gets quite graphic about how God will turn over the unfaithful wife/Israel to her lovers for them to destroy.
Israel as an unfaithful wife is a common metaphor in the prophets, and I’m trying to take to heart the message that my relationship with God is an intimate one, that God feels my betrayals as personally as a spouse who’s been cheated on. As a result, I’ve been trying not to skimp on the confession part of my prayers in my rush to get to the assurance of pardon. I can also approach the story as historical, as describing the history of Israel and saying how it will be for Israel in exile.
Still, this story sits in my gut like a gas bubble and I’m not sure what kind of foulness will result it it bursts.
And then I read on. Ezekiel 23 is about the repeated adultery of two sisters (aka Samaria and Jerusalem) against their husband/God. The story starts with this indictment: “They became prostitutes in Egypt. Even as young girls, they allowed themselves to be fondled and caressed” (v. 3). As if a young girl makes that happen because of her lust. As if a young girl being fondled is her fault.
There’s more stuff in the chapter, but that’s what really got me, what sent a lick of flame to one of my fears: that the Bible is a book by men for men, where what I am (female) is repeatedly misunderstood and misrepresented and used as a metaphor for what is wrong.
I know, I know. There’s more than that to God and more than that to the Bible. But it’s easier to keep that assurance going when I don’t have to read stories like the above. It is, in fact, what kept me from a regular devotional practice for years: fear that I’d meet a God who challenged my beliefs about him. But stories like that are in there. And I have to deal with them.
Here’s how I do it. I will keep reading the Bible, and I will find something amazing, something that gives me hope, something that tells me how much God loves me, how radical and countercultural God is, and the bubble will deflate. The bubble will still be there, because the Bible has some disturbing stuff in it that’s hard for this woman to deal with. But I also know that God is bigger than any culture’s language or stable of metaphors about him.
So even though I kind of want to at this moment, I won’t break up with the Bible. And I definitely won’t break up with God. I’m going to be uncomfortable for a little while, no doubt about it. But God will love me through it. He always has, and he always will. That is my faith.
There was a post this week on Brain Pickings about how looking at beautiful women can make both men and women judge the attractiveness of non-gorgeous women more harshly. About how focusing on beautiful women, in essence, makes us all unhappier. (Beautiful men did not have that effect.)
Which made me wonder, in general, whether the focus on beauty in general does us no favors. Yes, beautiful things / people / landscapes / moments draw our attention. And, yes, they are a wonder.
But they are the peaks of existence. The freaks of nature. The fleeting moments of perfection.
Which throws everything else into contrast. Most of life is not a peak. It’s not remotely perfect.
So part of my wondering about “beautiful” is how always looking around for and exclaiming about the peaks / freaks / fleeting perfections makes it difficult to settle into all those other 99% of moments of life.
“Beautiful” also irritates me: it holds an exterior standard of attractiveness above all other valuations (like interesting, deep, healed, useful, touching, strong, tender). And the dominant culture is the one that gets to determine what’s beautiful, which is so limiting. And it’s addictive, as in, focusing on beauty over time requires even more intensely beautiful things / people / landscapes / moments to even register as beautiful.
Beautiful seems like it goes deeper than pretty, but is it merely “more intense prettiness”?
I love the beauty in a sunset, a smile, a child’s profile, a piece of furniture. But I’m left with a suspicion about beautiful — it’s nice, but I don’t think it helps us flourish, or helps us invest in the things that should be invested in, or helps us love people any better. So, for me, beautiful gets a shrug. It’s very nice. But so what?
** I know I’m not supposed to add anything after the 5 minutes, but I’ve been reading a bunch of other FMF posts, and that crystallized what I’m talking about here. I don’t want to redeem “beautiful” from the world, I don’t want to expand the definition to include imperfections. I mistrust it as an adjective. I want to use better words for how a thing/person/landscape/moment makes me feel.
I recently returned from a family reunion that left me with a lot to think about. Yes, we caught up with the present of our lives, we watched the kids form their own little societies, we cooed over the babies, and sang songs late into the night around the campfire. But we also received a tremendous gift.
Two of my cousins had conducted interviews with the generation above us — the six boys and one girl who were children of our Oma and Opa. Just in time for this reunion, they distilled 21 hours of footage into a one-hour story that led us through their parents’ early lives in the Netherlands to their own years shortly after emigrating to Canada. They built on (and used photos from) the year-long project of another of our cousins to scan all the old family photos and documents and organize them into a CD that she then distributed to us ten or so years ago.
The film even began with a video none of us had seen before (and many didn’t even know existed) of the oldest uncle (now 78) as an 18-month old, toddling beside a canal in his short pants, babbling and crying until his Opa takes him for a boat ride. Like I said, a deep and tremendous gift.
One that spawned a great deal of storytelling and conversation afterwards.
The thing is, very few of those stories (some familiar, some new to me) and very little of the conversation was flattering to my grandparents, as parents.
My aunt and uncles grew up in what was probably a fairly typical upperclass home. Father’s study was the Holy of Holies, where you dared not enter unless you’d been granted permission, and woe unto you if you were sent there, and left to twist in agonizing anticipation while he made you wait to confess. Displays of emotion were unseemly, even positive ones, even within the privacy of the home. They were minister’s children, so their public behavior reflected back on their father, and violations were often dealt with harshly. There are stories that would break your heart and make you angry, but I won’t tell them here. They’re not mine to tell.
What’s mine to wonder is how I see this man who raised my father’s generation. One of his children worried about that and wanted some of the stories never to make it to light, so my generation wouldn’t think too badly of him. Which led me to wonder. How did I think of him?
My Opa died when I was 9, and I’d lived an ocean away for the last few years of his life, so I have just one memory of him, with his head back, shaking with silent laughter at a family party. What I have are his children, each one a prime product of intermittent reward.
Think of a squirrel at a birdfeeder that’s hard to reach, either ten feet down a rope or with a pressure-sensitive feeder bar. Watch it make its way to the food, only to be tossed or to fall off. Time after time after time. But it can smell and see the food; it knows it’s there. And every now and then, it manages to snag one seed. It knows food is possible, so it keeps working harder and harder to merit that one occasional seed. In squirrels, it makes for an entertaining show. In people, it makes for highly accomplished, hard charging, hard working risk takers and experts in whatever their chosen field; in other words (whether in academia, politics, business, church, or the nurture of people), my aunt and uncles.
I want to know the man who made them possible so I can better understand them. I admit it, I’m greedy: I want to know it all. The worry that he will seem like the villain of the story is a real one. But if I see him in the whole of his life, I think he’s more of an anti-hero. There is much that he did that was out-and-out heroic.
If an injustice was involved, he sprang into action. When his children were victims, he would march down to the school and demand justice. When his children were perpetrators, he could take calm and imaginative action, such as taking them to the police chief to confess and receive a lecture, and then negotiating restorative justice for the neighbor wronged. During World War II he worked in the Resistance, at considerable risk to himself and his family (including an awesome story of German soldiers coming to the house to search for him; he was home; so one of the aunts popped him in a nightgown and frilly cap and plunked a baby in his lap to successfully fool the soldiers and keep him safe). After the war, he moved his family of 9 to Canada in part so his sons would have more opportunities. He had studied literature before theology, so always wrote well (articles and sermons as well as poetry), and even did literary deconstruction on biblical texts (or so I’m told). He was proud to have played a role in the forward-thinking decision for the denomination to purchase land to increase the size and scope of Calvin College. And although I’m sure Oma frustrated him in other ways, he admired her more childlike and less anguished faith.
But.
And here’s where the stories I won’t tell would go. Trust me when I say they are not heroic.
So how do I see him? Hero or jerk? As with many either/or questions, I answer, “yes.”
Think of King David. God called him a man after His own heart. David was the king all other Israelite kings were measured against. He took tremendous risks and showed astonishing courage because he trusted God. Yet he was an adulterer and murderer. God wouldn’t let him build the Temple because there was too much blood on his hands. Yet he could recognize when he was wrong, when he’d sinned. He was concerned about justice for the vulnerable in his society. He wrote poetry whose truth and beauty have endured for thousands of years. Yet he let his kids run amok to rape their siblings and kill each other and foment rebellion against their father. He is one heck of a mixed bag.
But if I can look at King David, if I can delve into his story and still wind up admiring him, if I can see him as simultaneously a good example and a cautionary tale, I can do the same for my Opa. After all, I do the same for myself all the time. We are, each of us, a pretty mixed bag.
I hope my aunt and uncles aren’t afraid to tell us more. I think we can take it — not so much to understand him as to understand and appreciate them more.
How is truth handled in your family? Buried or blabbed? Fought about or trumpeted?
