On Being Blog

by Susan Leem, associate producer

Amidst the fanfare for Prince William and Catherine Middleton, another Catherine was celebrated today during the couple’s wedding ceremony. Dr. Richard Chartres, Anglican Bishop of London, celebrated the Feast of St. Catherine of Siena by quoting her during the homily. 

After William and Kate exchanged their vows and her brother James gave a reading, the bishop shared this line from the saint, philosopher, and theologian:

“Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.”

Saint Catherine was born the youngest (of a set of twins) of 25 children to an Italian family in 1397. She saw visions of Christ and experienced a “mystical marriage” with him that became the subject of art work from that period. She pursued a life of prayer, fasting, and penance as a Sister of Penance of St. Dominic despite her family’s objections.

St. Catherine is said to have “spoken boldly to popes and princes” and was brought to life in a one-woman play by Dominican nun Nancy Murray (sister of actor Bill Murray).

Sister Nancy has said:

“In reading her letters, I found this feisty, spirited woman who was both affectionate and straightforward.”

St. Catherine of Siena sounds like a wonderful example for Her Royal Highness Princess William of Wales, as well as all young women about to enter any relationship.

About the image: St. Catherine of Siena (photo: Lawrence Op/Flickr/cc by-nc-nd 2.0)

by Debra Dean Murphy, guest contributor

I didn’t get up at 4 a.m. today, but I do hope to catch a good bit of the wedding of William Windsor and Kate Middleton. I doubt I’ll have much trouble finding it replayed (and replayed and replayed) across the spectrum of cable and broadcast networks in the days and weeks to come.

Amid all the hype about the ceremony is a deep undercurrent of cynicism about these kinds of affairs, some of it rooted in the love/hate relationship Americans have always had with the British monarchy. We’re both drawn to and baffled by it — envious, perhaps, of its rich, centuries-long tradition, yet bewildered by the rigid and often humorless deference to protocol borne of that same tradition. (And then there are those who are downright hostile to the institution, extolling the American colonists who “fought a bloody war for the privilege to ignore the king of England”).

Many Americans will view the ceremony in Westminster Abbey with sensibilities shaped by a decade of reality TV’s take on matrimony: the bride as cutthroat competitor in a harem of beauties (The Bachelor), obscenely conspicuous consumption (Say Yes to the Dress), and “Wow, honey,” — as the veil is lifted — ”nice nose job!” (Bridalplasty).

Undergirding each of these “realities” is the notion of marriage as the culmination of a fairytale relationship — not the beginning, mind you, of a journey of discovery and friendship with its inevitable bumps in the road (more like sinkholes and craters) — but a consummate, bank-breaking spectacle staged primarily for the benefit of envious onlookers. No wonder we’re cynical.

But one thing that makes me more hopeful than cynical about this royal wedding is that the third person on the altar along with William and Kate, the one who married the nervous couple in view of the whole world, is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.

I have admired Williams since I first encountered his writings in seminary in the late 1980s when he was the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford University. The depth and breadth of his scholarship has always been staggeringly impressive. Whether writing on the Resurrection or Arianism or 9/11 or Dostoevsky, Williams — whose work is rooted in his vocation as priest — is an erudite, eloquent, humble, hopeful, generous communicator of the Christian gospel.

That he became the head of the worldwide Anglican communion in this age of soundbytes and short attention spans is lamentable — for him, perhaps, but especially for the rest of us. His careful, thoughtful way with words, the patience with which he engages his many and varied interlocutors, the long view he takes of the Church’s work in the world — none of this has endeared him to a skeptical, secular Britain nor to an Anglican Church ever on the edge of schism.

But Williams presses on with characteristic humility to illumine the issues that confront global Christianity. And with quiet authority he takes on matters of the human heart, human sexuality, and human community: fidelity in relationships, the risks of manipulation that attend all our relationships, and the grace necessary to sustain relationships like marriage for the long haul.

His writing is often at once mystical and deeply pragmatic, simultaneously acknowledging the mystery at the center of human sexuality and the mundane attentiveness required to persevere — and flourish — with another. In a sermon entitled “Is There a Christian Sexual Ethic?” Williams writes:

“The grace that is to be discovered in nakedness, in yielding, is released to be itself when we give up the self-protecting strategies of non-commitment, experiment, and gratification, and decide instead for the danger of promising to be there for another without a saving clause that would license us to abandon the enterprise as soon as the other declines to be possessed unilaterally by us, as soon as the other’s otherness gives us difficulty. In such a perspective, we have time for each other. A commitment without limits being set in advance says that we have (potentially) a lifetime to “create” each other together. By giving ourselves over to each other, we make something of each other.”

In a video prepared by Lambeth Palace in anticipation of the royal wedding, Williams talks about the “mystery” and “delight” at the heart of marriage, and that ”to be a witness [to a wedding] is to be more than a spectator.”

For cynics, this might seem like a slick media strategy designed to bring more attention to an event already wildly overhyped. But Williams locates this event (and every wedding) theologically as a “moment of hope and affirmation about people’s present and future” and he counts it a privilege to “wish [William and Kate] the courage and clarity to live out this big commitment.”

So, yes, there will be plenty of commercial excesses in today’s televised nuptials — lots of gossip about guests and gowns, lots of sarcasm and cynicism about the futures of the future king and queen. But maybe there will also be room for a moment of quiet gratitude for the gift of witnessing, with a few other billion people, the “commitments that are possible,” as Williams says, when two people take each other for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until they are parted by death.

Debra Dean Murphy is an assistant professor of Religion and Christian Education at West Virginia Wesleyan College and serves on the board of The Ekklesia Project. She regularly blogs at Intersections: Thoughts on Religion, Culture, and Politics.

We welcome your reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on the Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.

by Trent Gilliss, senior editor

Well, we may as well add to the deluge of posts about the royal wedding with a prenuptial video from the Archbishop of Canterbury, who presided over Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding ceremony today. In this Lambeth Palace production, Rowan Williams shares his optimism in knowing that a young couple are still willing to commit to one another and discover each another during these modern times in a fast-paced world:

“Here are young people sending a message of hopefulness, sending a message of generosity across the world. And, it’s my privilege to bless that in the name of God, to witness that in the name of God, and to send them on their way.”

by Janine Rayford, USC graduate journalism student

“This is the project of my life,” says sculptor Nihad Dabeet, 43, as he gives a tour of his unfinished home in Ramle, Israel. Built over 400 years ago, the house was in ruins until its newest tenant devoted himself to its renovation. Mr. Dabeet says he and his wife continue to excavate and build upon the land, without permission from the government.

Petite and jovial, Mr. Dabeet is an internationally known artist and sculptor who usually works with iron wire. From his dingy jeans and sweatshirt, it is hard to imagine a man whose art can cost thousands of dollars and is displayed and purchased throughout the world, including a recent exhibition in Atlanta, Georgia.

Now Mr. Dabeet’s main masterpiece is his home. Renting from an Arab couple who have owned the property before the State of Israel declared independence in 1948, the Ramle native and his wife have excavated rooms buried under more than 10 feet of sand and rubble.

With an art education from Bulgaria, Mr. Dabeet says that “as a sculptor you understand materials.” This understanding is allowing the Arab citizen of Israel to reconstruct a home out of ruin. So far, Mr. Dabeet has only refurbished a small percentage of the original structure.

What was once rubble has become a modern home with an aged façade. There are flat-screen televisions and jetted hot tubs, with Mr. Dabeet’s sculptures of women and olive trees featured throughout. The new mortar ends towards the back of the house.

Unlike in Jerusalem and Nazareth, the Israeli government and local Ramle municipality have not invested in the architectural preservation of Ramle. It is up to individual residents and shop owners to restore and maintain the centuries-old structures of the biblical city, often without support from the current government.

“They want to clear the old part and to build something new,” says Buthaina Dabit, a Ramle native who is giving a tour of the local ruins. Ms. Dabit points out the remnants of a building from the Ottoman period, which has been partially cleared for a parking lot near local shops.

Today, many buildings in Ramle are dilapidated and unlivable. “It’s Arab culture, so it has to be erased,” says Mr. Dabeet, speculating on why he thinks the city abstains from preservation. Families move on as stones crumble from their properties’ arches and ceilings, burying architecture and artifacts in piles of beige rubble. Stray cats abound amongst relics and materials that could belong in the Smithsonian.

Past the bathroom and through an open quad, the sculptor shows one unfinished room at the back of the house, where the ceiling continues to deteriorate.

“If I am not here to repair this every few years, it will just fall in,” he says.

All of this work will be for not if the city decides to bulldoze the property due to the illegal expansion of the structure. It is difficult for Arab citizens to receive permits to build or expand on their land. If they build without permits, their structures are subject to demolition by the municipality.

Despite lacking a building permit, “he insists to pay the taxes,” said Ms. Dabit. The artist hopes that paying taxes regularly may spare his home from demolition.

One of Mr. Dabeet’s projects is to resurface an entire room using tiles gathered from demolished Arab homes in the area. The artist has no trouble finding these tiles, considering the large number of home demolitions that have occurred in the Arab communities of Ramle and neighboring Lod. In an open-air quad on the property, festive-looking ceramic squares, some broken, stand in piles along the stone wall.

Dabeet’s house sits in the Christian quarter of Ramle, in the shadow of the massive Terra Santa Franciscan monastery and a few blocks down the street from an 800-year-old Arab-Christian restaurant.

Mr. Dabeet is a self-proclaimed atheist. “I never believed in the b—- s—-,” says the artist, standing next to a small plastic Christmas tree atop his refrigerator. His wife is a Muslim Bedouin from Libya and the mother of his two young daughters. The Dabeets are the only Muslim family in the area.

When Mr. Dabeet’s wife comes home with their girls, he scoops up his eldest daughter Samira Landa. Despite the uncertain future, the father is proud of the home that he is creating for his family, as well as the benefit it brings to the community.

“I was the right person in the right time to come to this place.”

All photos by Bethany Firnharber.

We welcome your original reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on the Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.

by Jonathan C. Bergman, guest contributor 

Haiti subscribes to two major religions — Voodoo and Catholicism — with born again Christians making great inroads in the past decade. The success of Haitian religious leaders in this time frame has spurred a series of “crusades” to aggressively minister and convert both non-believers and former Voodoo practitioners, especially after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. American and international religious groups working with their Haitian counterparts have watched a population attempting to reconnect with its spirituality. The Baptist Press reports 18,000 conversions to Christianity and 60,000 professions of faith in the past year alone.

Conversions, crusades, and outreach extend beyond Christianity with Voodoo experiencing a marked resurgence as well. Immediately after the earthquake struck, “1,000 members of the National Convention of Voodoo Priests” held a special meeting to determine a strategy for Haiti’s practical relief and psychic restoration. While some cast off Voodoo, others reflexively went back to Haiti’s “original” faith seeking a cure for the harm brought about by the disaster. Voodoo also has great allure since it is linked to Haitian nationalism and the peculiar cultural forms of the island nation.

The disaster has the unfortunate effect of exposing fissures in Haiti’s religious landscape. Even as religion has served to heal the psychic and spiritual harm in the wake of disaster a contest has emerged between Christianity and a mélange of Voodoo and animistic beliefs. This contest is bound up in the very formation of Haiti itself — the only successful slave rebellion in colonial history. Some argue that the price of nationhood via the Revolution of 1791-1804 was purchased with a “devil’s pact” binding Haiti in misery and the falsity of the Voodoo religion. According to this perspective, then, the earthquake was not a natural occurrence but divine retribution. This view embodies earlier and more superstitious explanations of disaster when extreme physical events were looked at as “harbingers of doom” of “bad stars” (the literal translation of the Latin dis | astrum).

The earthquake is only one in a series of ills which have befallen the nation since independence with endemic poverty, repressive regimes, and rampant crime all too common. This has led to protests against Voodoo, further complicating the post-disaster environment. Christianity is therefore seen as more than a spiritual alternative but a way to shake off the presumed curse. The danger exists with the most vulnerable of Haiti’s population pinning their hopes to guaranteed recovery via religion. What happens if and when their fortunes do not turn around in the fold of Christianity?

None of this is to suggest that Haiti is doomed to conflict and a failed period of renewal, though it is an indication of the problems and possibilities which exist in the meeting ground between religion and disaster. Given the efforts of Haitian nationals and international religious groups, the prospects for success seem promising. And with the majority of rebuilding still ahead, the practical and spiritual dimensions of disaster continue to unfold.

References

Barbara Denman, “In Haiti, Faith and Churches Continue to Sprout,” Baptist Press, March 25, 2010. 

Michael Martin, “In Earthquake Aftermath, Haitians Cling to Voodoo, Faith,” National Public Radio, January 22, 2010. 

Guy Nicholson, “Haiti: Suffering and Spirituality,” The Globe and Mail, January 10, 2011. 

Garry Pierre-Pierre, “Haitian earthquake unleashes animosity against Voodoo,” The Haitian Times, March 3, 2010. 

Kim Sengupta, “Voodoo: The Old Religion Rises from the Rubble in Haiti,” The Independent, February 1, 2010. 

Jonathan C. Bergman is Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University–Commerce. He holds a J.D. in Criminal Law from Touro Law School and a Ph.D. in twentieth-century American Political History from the University at Buffalo. His research interests include disaster and the relief process and the meeting ground between culture and calamity.

This essay is reprinted with permission of Sightings from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

by Susan Leem, associate producer

On Being has made an identity shift, expanding its scope to exploring questions about meaning, religion, ethics, and ideas. But our host Krista Tippett still asks her guests a key question during the interview about their religious or spiritual traditions in their formative years. And for a producer, it’s like watching her turn the key in the ignition.

The question always propels the guest somewhere unexpected even if, and maybe especially if, it’s a “no.” It really disarms them; you can almost hear their shoulders release and sit back a bit through the mic. Maybe they’re surprised that a radio host wants to know them as a human being and not just as a pundit or a preacher.

On Thursday, Minnesota Public Radio asked its listeners a similar question: “Do you pray?” And I’m dying to know the people behind these wise and sometimes humorous comments:

“Every day, throughout the day.”
Posted by Philip | April 21, 2011 10:16 AM

“I NEVER pray to ask God. I ONLY pary (sic) to thank God for what I have. It doesn’t make sense to pary (sic) to ask as if God will hold back on something you need and say ‘oh, you prayed so here’. Just doesn’t make sense. I finish that by saying I’m not sure if there is some one listening to my prayer but if I’m wrong, I rather be worng by praying to no one than not praying while God was waiting for a prayer.”
Posted by Mike | April 21, 2011 10:07 AM

“As an atheist, none. But, I certainly appreciate the potential of thoughtful introspection that often arises from prayer. Centering one’s self and understanding your needs (wants?) is important to all of us and if prayer may do that for some.”
Posted by Brian Ropers-Huilman | April 21, 2011 9:55 AM

“Given the state of the world, and humanity’s glaring incompetence to deal with its own problems so far, what else is there to do?”
Posted by Steve the Cynic | April 21, 2011 8:09 AM

“Good God no.”
Posted by J | April 21, 2011 8:00 AM

“As long as I can remember, even when my family went to mass weekly, I have always, always had a hard time with prayer. I kind of wonder if it’s not what help lead me to lack faith in Christianity as an adult. However, there is one exception: I’ll still say a Hail Mary or two in especially stressful situations. I’ve always done that, and I find it’s almost a reflex.”
Posted by vjacobsen | April 21, 2011 7:44 AM

About the image: Krista interviews Avivah Zornberg during this year’s production trip to Israel and the West Bank. (photo: Trent Gilliss)

by Krista Tippett, host

I recently attended a remarkable gathering in Washington, D.C., the U.S.-Islamic World Forum, cohosted by the Brookings Institution and the government of Qatar. For the past eight years this event has been held in Doha, Qatar.

This year, of course, the “Muslim world” is in the midst of seismic change. It was a remarkable experience to be — at this moment — with state and diplomatic leaders, civic and humanitarian activists, and senior religious authorities from Muslim majority countries around the world, as well as their counterparts from the United States and other nations.

So I found myself next to the Iraqi ambassador to the United States in one session and next to a young Bahraini human rights activist at another. She was juggling a laptop, an iPhone and an iPod simultaneously (and with notable ease). I made a lighthearted remark about how she was redefining the meaning of multitasking for me. She responded graciously, with a lovely smile, and then told me she was following new pictures just released on the Internet showing that Bahraini political prisoners are being tortured. Her father and two brothers, she told me, are in those prisons. She was fierce with dignity.

Representatives of Turkey, meanwhile, suddenly found themselves the “democratic model” of the Arab world that others want to study and emulate.

Key players from the emerging Egyptian leadership were also in attendance, as were ministers from the new government in Tunisia. And the Egyptians and Tunisians were, to a one, quite transformative simply to be around. They seemed to glow. They manifest a sense of having lived through a miracle, even as they face the tasks ahead with gravity.

“We have discovered ourselves,” one longtime Egyptian activist proclaimed. And there is clearly no turning back on this collective self-discovery, painful and uncertain as the road ahead may be.

In a sense, this moment challenges Americans to a new era of self-discovery, too. As we watched ordinary men and women, young and old, become citizens for the first time on Tahrir Square, we saw a version of our own national narrative unfolding. The economic and foreign policy challenges ahead of us are profound — and will become even harder as countries like Saudi Arabia inevitably experience their version of the “Arab Spring.”

These events force us to ask hard questions of the policies we condoned for years, of decades-long dictatorships that we helped hold in power. More presently and importantly, they ask us to bring the best of our virtues, and the complexity of what we have learned in our own 200 years of democratic experiment, to the changed world we inhabit now.

by Susan Lynne White, guest contributor

In the Czech Republic, a tradition of spanking or whipping women is carried out on Easter Monday. On Easter Monday morning, it is customary for girls and women to stay at home while the boys and men, usually dressed in nicer clothing and sometimes even in kroj — traditional costume — go door to door of female relatives and/or friends, bringing greetings, singing Easter carols, demanding the right to spank the women with a special handmade whip called a pomlázka and/or splash them with cold water or perfume for good luck and fertility, and demanding “treats” (eggs, chocolate, liquor, or a peck on the cheek) as their reward.

The splashing of water is intended to oblievat — to “water” the females present. Water is the symbol of life and the pouring of water is a gesture meant to bestow year long health, beauty, and fertility. Some men spray perfume instead of water, or both. The splashing of water can range from a teaspoon dribbled on top of the head, to a bucket thrown over the head, to a full body dunking in a bathtub full of cold water.

A pomlázka consists of eight, 12, or even 24 willow rods, usually measuring from half a meter to two meters in length, which are braided together and decorated with colored ribbons at the end. There used to be a tradition that women would add their own ribbons so the whip would say how many women the particular man has already visited, but it seems to have fizzled out. The spanking normally is not painful or intended to cause suffering. The purpose of the spanking for women to bestow health, beauty, and, most importantly, fertility for the

Usually women are chased around (if they decide to make it interesting or to play along) or they just stand motionless and allow the male visitors to spank their butt. After being spanked or splashed, the women must give candy or money to a boy, and liquor or a small amount of money to a man as a sign of her thanks.

We welcome your original reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on the Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.

by Pádraig Ó Tuama, guest contributor

It is Easter week. This week, we remember the events from Thursday’s meal to Friday’s torture to Saturday’s silence and Sunday’s mystery.

Years ago, 13 years ago in fact, I fell apart. I was 22 and I had already been sick for a year. It had started with a bad flu that had never gone away. After 12 months, I was bewildered and dizzy and achy, confused with a fatigue and an illness that would take a further five years to diagnose and a total of nine years to recover from.

Up until that point, I hadn’t spent much time contemplating chronic illness. However, after a year of being ill, hearing doctors’ opinions, berating myself with my own opinions, I was firmly contemplating chronic illness. When you are chronically ill, there are some things to learn — you must learn to relate to your sickness, and you must learn to relate to your feelings about being sick. In the face of these two lessons, I was gutted with a raw fear in the face of the unknown.

For Lent that year, I read a chapter of Job every day. It was less a religious exercise and more an exercise of survival. I needed some kind of echo of the bewilderment, loneliness, and confusion. Job became a friend. I heard his grief, and I heard his sadness.

And, for the last two weeks of Easter in 1998, I went to a monastery in eastern France for two weeks of silence. Looking back on it, it might seem unwise — responding to a hollowness inside me by going to a place of silence. I don’t know what prompted me to go, but I went. I was welcomed by a gentle monk who showed me to my small room and told me that it might not be a good idea to read all the time.

“Il faut écouter, avec les oreilles de tendresse, à ton propre silence,” he said. “You must listen, with ears of tenderness, to your own silence.”

Ha! I was petrified of that silence. I read The Lord of the Rings in five days flat.

It took 11 days before I began to relax. By that time, it was Holy Thursday, and the time when the Last Supper is remembered. That morning, the brother spoke to the pilgrims gathered for a few minutes after breakfast to set a tone of inspiration for the day. He noted how Jesus said in the Gospel of Luke, “I have earnestly desired this meal.”

He didn’t paint a picture of a Nazarene who ran to the arms of Roman torture willingly, but he depicted a character who believed enough in a way of life to take that way of life to the death. The monk spoke about how Jesus lived the last days of his life in a way that was faithful to the life he’d always lived — calling enemies and dispossessed ones “friends,” having concern for his mother, accepting help from a Cyrenian stranger, looking for moments of life while life itself was draining away.

I don’t know what happened, but somehow, I began to breathe. I remember I was sitting in a chapel, listening to a German nun tune an eclectic zoo of musicians into some kind of harmony. Nothing cataclysmic occurred — it was just that I began to fear my own darkness a little less. I began to feel where I had only known numb and lonely survival. I began to feel that if I am here, then perhaps I am here with a companion. There were few words of prayer; there was a deep sense of accompaniment. I began to recognise that I didn’t need the words to describe the chronic illness that was indescribable.

That Easter Sunday I cried. Not because of some miraculous resurrection. I had eight long years to wait before my health began to improve. I cried because, in the words of an old monk, I heard an echo of an understanding that went beyond words, and, in that echo there was companionship.

Years later, when studying theology, I came across Hans Urs Von Balthasar. Von Balthasar is noted for many things, one of which is his poetic retelling of Christ’s descent into hell. He said, “Jesus descended into hell. He is dead with us, and disturbs our loneliness. … God, in the weakness of love enters into solidarity with us who find ourselves damning ourselves, in the form of the crucified brother abandoned by God…and in such a way that is clear to the sinner that God-the-Forsaken is so for my sake.”

Each year on Easter Sunday I find myself moved. Not because there is a happy ever after ending to all of our stories. It is quite clear that there is not. I am moved because of a sacred echo of a hope that there is solidarity for those who feel like we inhabit a small hell of our own experience. The hope of Easter doesn’t damn this hell with a bleaching light. Rather this hope enters and squats with us. The celebrations of Holy Week for me are not about cataclysmic resurrections, but about being moved to follow in the life of the Nazarene, bravely entering into loneliness with a small spring of consoling company.

We welcome your original reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on the Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.

by Debra Dean Murphy, guest contributor

In the beginning was poetry.

The book of Genesis, as Ellen Davis has observed, starts with a liturgical poem. The creation of the cosmos can only be communicated, the ancients knew, through language that speaks to the imagination — that unity of intellect and emotion, which was for the biblical writers the restless human heart.

Images and metaphors are primary speech, conveyers of truth — durable yet pliable, precise yet ever expansive in the vision of the world (and ourselves) they set before us.

That they were describing biological or geological processes would never have occurred to the redactors of the Bible’s foundational stories. Not because they were uninterested in or incapable of such description but because the truths they were telling were not available within discursive speech; the reporting of facts was not the business they were in. For most of the Church’s history, interpreters of biblical language understood this.

And then there were propositions.

With modernity came the quest for scientific certainty and singularity of meaning. Texts were read in the same way that ore was mined from the earth: you dig and dig and the Truth, like a nugget of gold, is eventually dislodged. You extract it with your best tools, dust it off, and hold it up to the light for all to admire. This Truth, this narrowly defined, singular “meaning” of this or that text, became an object of adoration and it wasn’t long before modern Christians were worshiping the Bible itself rather than the One to whom it points.

And this Bible, moderns continue to insist, speaks in propositions: The Word of God as a collection of truthful statements that must be assented to. Christianity as a list. Do you believe the right propositions?

The resurrection stories in the four Gospels differ significantly from one another (as do the Creation stories in Genesis 1-2). What might it mean for us to recover — in our living, in our worship, and in our preaching — the poetic possibilities of these stories? Could we stop straining toward explanations for the inexplicable? Could we trust that Jesus’ friends — to their own incredulity as much as anyone’s — experienced him fully alive after his tortuous death and that this is not so much a scientific fact to be endlessly probed as it is gospel — genuine good news — to be lived?

And can we see the poetic genius of St. John who brings the resurrection story back to Genesis’s cosmic beginnings in a garden?

Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”
—Gospel of John, 20:15

Jesus is the patient gardener. He is the “tree of life.” He is the new creation. And in him we live.

From the far star points of his pinned extremities,
cold inched in — black ice and squid ink —
till the hung flesh was empty.
Lonely in that void even for pain,
he missed his splintered feet,
the human stare buried in his face.
He ached for two hands made of meat
he could reach to the end of.
In his corpse’s core, the stone fist
of his heart began to bang
on the stiff chest’s door, and breath spilled
back into that battered shape. Now
it’s your limbs he comes to fill, as warm water
shatters at birth, rivering every way.
—Mary Karr, “Descending Theology: The Resurrection”

Debra Dean Murphy is an assistant professor of Religion and Christian Education at West Virginia Wesleyan College and serves on the board of The Ekklesia Project. She regularly blogs at Intersections: Thoughts on Religion, Culture, and Politics.

We welcome your reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on the Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.

by Christopher Martin, guest contributor

It’s about as simple as poems come:

Easter is on the field:
Flowers declare
With bloom their tomb unsealed
To April air.

Little lambs
New as the dew shake cold,
Beside their anxious dams:
Easter is on the fold.

Its simplicity shouldn’t be confused with sentimentality, though. Today, little lambs, blossoming flowers, and the like are stock symbols of the season, largely taken for granted, appropriated by salesmen to be consumed by us. We buy stuffed toy lambs, chocolate lambs, Hallmark cards with pictures of lambs. It’s not my point to say whether this is right or wrong, but it is clearly sentimental.

Because Easter is a sentimental and therefore commercialized holiday, it’s all too easy to read Reece’s poem through pastel lenses, to imagine chicks and bunnies at the feet of the lambs, to imagine the lambs frolicking and stopping to sniff the blossoming flowers. But I don’t think it’s a sentimental poem at all.

Byron Herbert Reece wrote “Easter” in a setting far removed from the commercialized holiday we know today — sometime around the middle of the last century in a north Georgia valley bounded by mountains and crossed by the Nottely River, in a farming community called Choestoe. Reece himself was a small-scale farmer who worked a piece of bottomland alongside rhododendron-veiled Wolf Creek. As such, the flowers and lambs in his verses are not abstract ones. They weren’t conceived in the mind of an entrepreneur to be born in a Chinese factory; they are flowers and lambs from nowhere but the dew-wet hills of Georgia. The poet saw the blossoming of peach trees, service trees, and laurel. He watched the shivering newborn lambs owned by a Choestoe neighbor for reasons far beyond sentiment.

If “Easter” is not a sentimental poem, then, what is it? The next temptation, I think, is to read it as a symbolic poem, to see the blossoming flowers and the lambs as signs of new life with the obvious correlation to Christ’s resurrection. But I don’t think that’s quite right, either.

Reece was a practicing Christian, to be sure — even filling in for his preacher from time to time — but he was also too good of a poet to build a poem upon cliché, and the great cliché of Easter is that the vitality of spring represents the vitality of the risen Christ. To see the cycling of nature as nothing more than a religious symbol is to live on another plane. I think Reece understood, with Thoreau, that “heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.” And so Reece does something lovely with this poem: He turns the usual metaphor around.

“Flowers declare / With bloom their tomb unsealed / To April air,” he writes. The “tomb unsealed” is an allusion to Christ’s death and resurrection, of course, but it is the tomb, rather than the blossoming flowers, that serves as symbol here. In the same way, it is Easter itself that blesses the sheepfold, and not the other way around.

Flowers and lambs, then — and by extension all created things — have worth independent of doctrine. Doctrine, at its best — and in this case the doctrine of the resurrection — sheds light on the holiness of this world. Reece would’ve known that Mary Magdalene, the first to see the risen Christ, mistook him for a gardener. Resurrection abounds if we would but look.

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by Susan Leem, associate producer

Musician, conductor, composer Bobby McFerrin seems to have achieved two disparate levels of fame or infamy depending on who you ask.

One group of audiophiles I know marvel at his four-octave vocal range, improvisational skills, and musicianship, especially his conducting work with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and collaborations with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and jazz great Chick Corea. Another group remembers his popular culture contributions: that billboard-topping hit “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” or the The Cosby Show season 4 opener, and may recall those 10 Grammy awards he has accepted over the years.

When we saw Bobby “hacking your brain” with the pentatonic scale and taking an interest in neuroscience, we knew that he was after some of the same questions On Being loves to explore.

We hope you enjoy this live Web stream of his interview with Krista Tippett in the rehearsal room of Orchestra Hall just before his solo performance in Minneapolis.

Photo by Carol Friedman.

by Kate Moos, executive producer

Each of them decry the wretched realities of children in poverty but tell different stories, in different tones. The Song of Experience begins, in outrage:

Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduc’d to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?

The Song of Innocence presents a picture of orderly and gentile charity to which the British class system condemned the poor. The poem ends with a sarcastic exhortation to “cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.”

Both poems recall yet another Song of Experience, “The Human Abstract,” which begins:

Pity would be no more
If we did not make somebody Poor;
And Mercy no more could be
If all were as happy as we.

Blake himself, of course, lived in abject poverty for most of his life and was actually buried on borrowed money in a graveyard reserved for dissenters and nonconformists.

Image courtesy of ©2003 Fitzwilliam Museum