Unbearable Expectations in “American Housewife”

Review of Helen Ellis's American Housewife - read on KateRaeDavis.com

What does being a wife mean? How does the role of wife impact a woman’s identity?

These are the core questions we address in a bi-monthly in a project called Literary Wives. We read novels with an eye on what they have to add to our understanding of what it means to be a wife and a woman.

Our most recent pick: American Housewife: Stories by Helen Ellis. Check out other thoughts and reviews on the same novel from Literary Wives bloggers! You can find them all through the Literary Wives page.

American Housewife is a despair-filled look at how USAmerican society defines success for women today.

The collection could have easily been called American Woman. The emphasis in the title on “housewife” highlights what her characters reveal again and again: our narrative for the peak of success for a woman in America is to become a housewife.

In one story, “How to Be a Patron of the Arts,” the best friend of a would-be writer tells her “Madam, you are a lady of the house. You are a woman of leisure. That is all anyone in their right mind wants to be.” The statement is silently in the foreground of every story in the work.

“A woman of leisure.” Her time is her own, to do with as she wishes. She is not concerned with rent bills or obtaining food; everything is easily purchasable, with her husband’s paycheck. Her time is entirely her own, to pursue whatever she most desires.

So why are the women of leisure in these stories so discontent?

The answer, as each story adds its own layers to the themes, is complex.

It has something to do with the complete lack of spirit for the options presented women, while also acknowledging the burdensome expectations placed upon them. There’s a component of the soul-sucking nature of being treated primarily as a consumer. And of unfulfilling relationships. And of hitting hard against the limitations of the “women can have it all” myth.

It’s about the lack of desire, options, connections, anything that would provide a meaningful structure to a life.

Ellis’s tone reflects this perfectly. She has a kind of “better to laugh than cry” style, a humor that just thinly blankets the depths of despair.

A thread that runs throughout many of the stories is the failure to obtain “having it all.” You know the “have it all” myth — it’s the one that says you (must be!) the loving wife, the warm homemaker, the caring mother, the successful careerist / brilliant artist, and fit into your jeans from college.

The stories highlight the unrealistic, unattainable nature of this myth. Meeting the high bar of society’s standards of even one component of the “have it all” life is, as her characters reveal, so totally time-consuming as it would be at the expense of all other things.

Ellis sprinkles her stories with women who think they can have it all — only to find out that they delayed having children too long. Or that they aren’t as fulfilled by housewifery as they thought they’d be. Or that they’ve given up their job to pursue their passion, only to find that they self-sabotage their passion for the purpose of maintaining the social image on behalf of the husband, out of gratitude (clean house, social connection maintenance). For one character, trying to pursue just two aspects of the “have it all” life — writing and being the loving wife — results in a merely superficial engagement of both.

The final story has this real-life metaphor of a line: “When ladies try to be perfect, their periods stop.” The perfection of society’s expectations of wifeliness sabotages the possibility of motherhood.

I want to focus on two of the pieces that succinctly express the unbearable demands our society places on women.

“What I Do All Day” and “How to Be a Grown-Ass Lady” epitomize Ellis’s answer to the discontent of womanhood in married USAmerica.

“What I Do All Day” is a narrative of (what the reader can imagine) is a pretty standard day in the life of the titular American housewife, in all its full mundane meaningless absurdity.

It’s startling to realize what a large portion of her day is consumer-driven. Most of her daytime interactions are with inanimate objects (“I berate the pickle jar…I level picture frames”). The automaton narration of the day indicates that there is no joy, no pleasure to be found in the cooking, cleaning, rearranging. It is simply what one days; the fulfillment of a wifely role.

Her emotions are at once entirely relatable, but when written on paper, in a format we normally encounter narrative and adventure, it highlights how silly and inconsequential the fears really are (“I break into a sweat when I find a Sharpie cap, but not the pen”).

A tragic paragraph focuses on her self-image, on the expectations society places on women that are entirely unattainable. She ends the paragraph with, “I drown my sorrows with Chanel No 5” — a body image problem created by society’s consumer-orientation (seeing women’s bodies as objects for the purpose of visually consumption for male pleasure), and also solved by it (with the right product).

Relationally, she is equally without joy. At a party, she feigns interest for the appearance of connection. The one-liners she shares with us, the readers, are without context. That is, they’re without connection to anything that might lend meaning. We feel that the delivery conveys how the relationships feel to her — without connection that might lend meaning.

There are two lines that convey, at once, the depth of emotion and also some level of realization at how foolish and shallow the provocateurs of emotion are. Early on she tells us: “I weep because I am lucky enough to have a drawer just for glitter.” She’s aware of the absurdity of her immense wealth and privilege, even as she has no actionable outlet for it.

And then the final line of the story: “I think I couldn’t love my husband more, and then he vacuums all the glitter.”

“How to Be a Grown-Ass Lady” is an orderless list of commands that outlines the expectations of modern adult women.

Part of me wants to call it absurdist, but it’s so spot-on — I personally recognize these expectations on my adult female being — that perhaps it’s better called hyper-realist.

It covers health, relationships, charity, age-appropriate behavior, listing all these tidbits with the same monotonous tone that conveys everything is of equal importance — which is next to none.

Much of it, of course, is body-image-focused: “Wear sunscreen…don’t bite your cuticles.”

This runs in with the consumer-oriented maintenance that society expects (nearly demands) of women: “Go to the mall for your Clinique bonus gift. .. Get refitted for bras on your birthday.”

According to the demands, we mediate relationship through the purchasable, the consumable: “If your husband wants a bigger TV, for heaven’s sake let him have it”). Or, we must sidestep relationship from being too genuine:”If you don’t like something someone says, say: ‘That’s interesting.’ If you like something someone says, say: ‘That’s interesting!'”

Even charitable giving — historically a source of meaning-making for American housewives — becomes simply a task that one completes to be a grown-ass lady; becomes simply part of the role: “When St Jude’s mails you personalized address labels and asks for a forty-five-dollar donation, write them a check.”

So, what does all this have to say about being a wife?

Soul-sucking monotony. Crushing societal expectation. Dehumanizing consumerism.

Ellis writes, “Marriage is a soft place full of three-thousand-dollar couches and twenty-eight-dollar bottles of wine.” Marriage is defined in terms of what you purchase, is a place of comfort (couches) and numbness (wine).

The last sentence of the last story reveals what I hear the entire collection hinting towards. In the wake of a novel being published, a dramatic attempt at being “good enough,” a woman is in her home “listening for the yellow wall phone to ring.”

Given the modernity of the work (who uses landlines anymore?) and the unusual syntax (“wall phone”?), I have to imagine this is an allusion to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In it, a woman suffering postpartum depression is driven mad by the bedrest the doctor prescribes, and her husband enforces, to cure the depression.

In both stories: after achieving what society demands of us (a marketable work; a child), we’re driven mad by the very thing that society orders us to do.

This book came to me at the right time of my life.

As I discern which directions to advance my career and whether to, erm, advance my family or not, I’m in the midst of sorting out how many roles I can successfully balance (priest, professor, writer, mother…) without going mad myself.

I’d recommend Ellis’s work for anyone in a similar stage of life, or just generally despairing over the difficulty and inability to have it all, do it all, be it all. She’s the friend who will remind you that you’re not alone, that you’re not the one who’s crazy (it’s our society that is), and hopefully help you laugh — or at least wryly smile — at the impossible expectations.

Don’t forget to check out other thoughts and reviews on the same novel from Literary Wives bloggers! You can find them all through the Literary Wives page.

September 20, 2016September 17, 2016

Reflections on A Convergent Model of Renewal

Reflections on C Wess Daniel's "A Convergent Model of Renewal" - read on KateRaeDavis.com

There have been moments when I’ve been in church and my mind drifts from the creed I’m reciting or from the hymn that I’m singing and wonders, of its own accord: What am I doing here? What are WE doing here??

Couldn’t this building be used for better purposes? Couldn’t we all be doing something to improve the community with this hour? What does this hour have anything to do with the rest of my life?

And what is it that keeps me coming back to church?

These are moments in which I’m participating in tradition, but the tradition isn’t connecting to my context.

In language that C Wess Daniels, author of A Convergent Model of Renewal, would use: those questions appear when my community is being conservative to the tradition without being emergent to the context.

I imagine my parents experienced the other side of the spectrum when they visited my college church. I think they were wondering what anything they were seeing had to do with the Christian tradition they knew. It was, perhaps, emergent without being conservative. Contextualized in the culture, but lacking tradition.

It is into these dilemmas that Daniels offers a model of what he calls convergence. He defines convergence as “the interplay between a group being conservative—to the tradition—and emergent—within context.”

Faith communities that are convergent are dedicated to building on the existing tradition in a way that applies that tradition to the current context. It’s a tradition that goes beyond the one-hour service and into the community’s life, goes beyond the walls of the church and into the neighborhood.

Tradition is everything that has shaped an existing community. It includes practices, values, and relationships. It tells you where to sit and when to stand. Tradition is inescapable. Daniels writes specifically of the Quaker tradition, but the same is true for every denomination and faith community. Even for a brand-new church plant, the tradition of the community is embedded in the individuals making up the community. If a church plant is comprised of recovering evangelicals and lapsed Roman Catholics, that will shape the community’s practices and values.

In A Convergent Model of Renewal, Daniels honors the importance of tradition while acknowledging that conflicts arise between a tradition and its application in the ever-changing context of culture.

Too often, churches cling to tradition and shun any new knowledge, wisdom, or information. Churches become champions of tradition at the cost of their relevance. It’s exactly what we see in the Christian-vs-secular so-called “culture wars.”

On the other end of kneejerk responses, tradition is abandoned altogether. In contemporary USAmerica, I think we see this in the rise of the “spiritual nones” (atheists and agnostics), the “spiritual but not religious,” and the “spiritual dones” (professed Christ-followers who don’t participate in a tradition).

Both the traditionalist/anti-secular and the anti-traditionalist/emergent responses are somewhere between inadequate and nonsensical.

Daniels is fighting a hard battle on two fronts.

Traditionalists and relevance-seekers are so often entrenched in this either/or mindset that they’re hardly on speaking terms with one another — and Daniels is adamant that we need both. And not just that we need both camps to exist, we need them to actually become one camp that works together, appreciates one another, even learns from one another.

Daniels argues that when conflicts arise between tradition and context, what’s needed is a transformative convergence that holds both tradition and culture together.

From the tradition side, Daniels gives models of contextual theology (Ch2) with understanding that all theology is contextual. From the emergent culture side, he discusses ways that people actively participate in culture (Ch3). He illustrates why it is not a worthwhile cause to combat culture or tradition, arguing that the two are better together, and that we can arrive at that ideal through remix. “Remix shows tradition and innovation working together to create something new.” As I’ve written before, I strongly believe that Jesus lived this way and wanted us to follow him as remix masters.

I write on the ways Christians use remix in art and ritual. But Daniels looks at the life of the community as the center for and product of remix. For him, remix occurs in the full life of services and relationships and daily living. He argues that the remix isn’t only in the art we produce but in who we are and how we live — together.

And this is why I find his work courageous.

The traditionalists don’t want anything transformed: change from the nostalgia-tinted past is what got us into this secular mess in the first place. At its extreme, traditionalists would prefer to do away with “secular” culture entirely and stick to tradition as they understand it.

And the emergents don’t want anything to do with tradition: it’s tradition that has messy hierarchies, obsolete beliefs, and irrelevant practices. At its extreme, emergents would prefer to do away with tradition entirely and create something new, without all the problems of the past.

These two camps rarely come together for religious discourse.

Of course, when we try to live in either of these extremes, things seem to only get worse.

The Puritans, for example, came to America hoping to build their infamous City on a Hill. It clearly didn’t work out as well as they hoped, largely, I would assert, because they didn’t think through the ways that culture is inescapable. As long as they’re alive, they’ll need to eat and to manufacture and to relate – all these messy things that make up a (ahem) culture.

Throwing away tradition to make something “without all the problems” is equally laughable. How many church plants have tried to make a denomination without the hierarchy and politics and rigid rule- and belief-systems of their parents’ churches, only to find they had replicated the same structures? I won’t name names.

Personally, I’ve tried to choose is something in the middle of these extreme approaches (although I’ll admit I’m sometimes tempted by the emergent side). It wasn’t an option for me to stay in the faith tradition I was raised in, so I did leave. But it wasn’t an anti-tradition move, it was an anti-that-tradition move. In the Episcopal Church, I found a tradition that is more suitable to convergence. It’s this tradition to which I’ve committed myself, knowing that I will work within it to modify and advance it for our current time. And knowing that I’ll have to teach future generations to do the same for their times.

Daniels writes about the importance of committing to a tradition and the culture at once.

He encourages people to become adherents to their tradition in order to create change within it. Adherents experience the conflict between church and context, but rather than entrench themselves on one side of the fence, they work to dismantle the fence.

Adherents develop self-awareness of problems with the current church and – rather than denying or running from those problems – they look to their tradition to overcome the crisis. The tradition, for adherents, holds both the problem and the solution. The solution is in the own tradition’s ideas and practices that are simply applied in different ways, or perhaps applied for the first time in centuries, in order to accommodate the different context.

Adherents step into the complexity of conflict in order to resolve it.

Adherents don’t hate tradition, and they don’t fear change.

To some extent, they must embrace both tradition and change in order to be mission-oriented. Daniel writes that “missiology reminds the church that essential to its very ecclesiology is to be in dialogue with cultural forces, looking for where God is already at work within the world.”

“Renewal must come from the insiders of the movement.”

The point that cannot be overemphasized. When people “leave the church to follow Jesus,” they’re claiming — often against their spoken belief — that following Jesus is an entirely individual activity that has no need for community.

But renewal of the church comes from “the very practitioners who have devoted themselves as apprentices to its texts, virtues and practices.” Not by leaving those traditions to prove how messed up it is.

Daniels’s work is valuable not only because he offers hope that this is possible, but he actually explains different ways that it’s done.

And what’s more than the concepts alone is that Daniels shows us how it’s done.

The subtitle of the book is “Remixing the Quaker Tradition in a Participatory Culture,” but the ideas and its application are much wider than the Quaker tradition alone. If you’re not Quaker, the book is still immensely useful. Consider the portions on Quakerism as a case study for the work to be done in any faith tradition. Chapters 5 and 6 go more deeply into Quaker history and identity than I found useful, but they do provide a framework for how these concepts are discerned and embodied in a real world setting. The concepts are what’s key; the Quakerism chapters simply show how the concepts play out when applied.

Well, that’s way more thoughts than I normally give in a review. I tried to give a thorough overview of his concepts because I’m aware that this work isn’t for everyone; it’s quite academic in tone. That said, I’d highly recommend it –at least the first four chapters—for graduate students or pastors seeking to understand the role of tradition in today’s world, and to understand how to do “relevance” in deeper ways than rock band music.

Disclosure notice: Daniels sent me a free copy of his work after reading one of my posts on remix. He thought that our ideas are in the same vein and that I might appreciate his work.

I may not have picked up his book if I hadn’t been sent it, but I’m so glad he did. It’s a model for the church going forward that I’d been hoping for.

In the comments…

Are you more tempted by the impulse to too-strictly adhere to tradition or the impulse to abandon tradition?

Why do you stay, or why have you left?

June 21, 2016June 20, 2016

Modern Demons: The Brothers K, Mass Shootings, and the Demon-Possessed Man

We don’t talk about demons very often these days. I think that it’s one of the concepts we left behind in an effort to view ourselves as more advanced than our ancestors. We think it primitive to believe in spiritual forces that seek to destroy individuals and communities through possession. We hear, in scripture, about the man possessed by a “legion,” a regiment, of demons, and our first thought is: mental illness.

In today’s world, we’re much more likely to talk about ideologies and worldviews, about energies and forces. We talk about how they shape individuals and societies, how they have the power to become obsessions in some. We talk about how they can injure and harm. All of which sounds a bit … well, demonic.

In David James Duncan’s novel The Brothers K, there is a scene that I think reads like an interpretation of the possessed man whose demons drown in a lake. At the point we the story enter, teenaged Peter has just lied down under the sprinkler with his young twin sisters, Freddy and Bet. They’re contemplating the movement of forces in the world — what they call “humps of energy.”

“For instance,” Freddy says, “when a person gets mad at somebody…like when you get really mad and maybe slap somebody or jerk their arm or something, like Mama does to us sometimes, I think an invisible hump of energy might go flying all the way up their arm and right into their skeleton or insides or whatever — a hump of mean, witchy energy — and I think it might fly round and round in there…and go right on hurting invisible parts of the person you don’t even know you’re hurting, because you can’t see all the ways their insides are connected to the mean thing you did to their outside. And from then on, maybe that hump of mean energy sits inside the hurt person like a rattlesnake, just waiting in there. And someday, that energy might come out of them and hurt the next person too, even though the person didn’t deserve it.”

Peter responds, “I think that can happen, does happen. But every witch who ever lived was once just a person like you or me, that’s what I think anyway, till somewhere, sometime, they got hit by a big, mean hump of nasty energy themselves, and it shot inside them just like Freddy said, and crashed and smashed around, wrecking things in there, so that a witch was created. The thing is, though, I don’t think that first big jolt is ever the poor witch’s fault.” The sprinkler hissed.

“Another thing,” Peter said, “is that everybody gets jolted. You, me, before we die we’ll all get nailed —- lots of times. But that doesn’t mean we’ll all get turned into witches. You can’t avoid getting zapped, but you can avoid passing the mean energy on. That’s the challenging thing about witches — learning not to hit back, or hit somebody else, when they zap you. You can be like a river when a forest fire hits it– phshhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Just drown it, drown all the heat and let it wash away.”

“And the great thing,” he said, “the reason you can lay a river in the path of any sort of wildfire is that there’s not just rivers inside us, there’s a world in there. Christ says so. But I feel it sometimes too. I’ve felt how there’s a world, and rivers, and high mountains, whole ranges of mountains, in there. And there are lakes in those mountains — beautiful, pure, deep blue lakes. Thousands of them. Enough to wash away all the dirt and trouble and witchiness on earth.”

Bet’s mind had eased down into a place where hiss of sprinkler, splash of drops and babbling of brother were all just soothing sensations. But Freddy was still watching Peter’s face when he said, “But to believe in them! To believe enough to remember them. That’s where we blow it! Mountain lakes? In me? Naw! Jesus says The kingdom of heaven is within you, and we dream up something after death. Something truly heavenly, something with mountains higher than St Helens or Hood and lakes purer and deeper than any on earth — we never look for such things inside us… So when the humps of witchiness come at us, we’ve got nowhere to go, and just get hurt, or get mad, or pass them on and hurt somebody else. But if you want to stop the witchiness, if you want to put out the fires, you can do it. You can do it if you just remember to crawl, right while you’re burning, to drag yourself clear up into those mountains inside you, and on down into those cool, pure lakes.”

We don’t know much about the demons — the energies — of the Gerasene community, where the demon-possessed man was driven from. We don’t know how they came to possess this man, why they chose him, what type of evil they’re about. We only get to hear that they are many — a legion, a regiment. And they have converged in this one body, this one man.

There are many demons in our own culture, whose names we are might know: Homophobia. Transphobia. Islamophobia. Racism. Sexism. Nationalism. Ethnocentrism. Just to name a few. Demons that too often converge to possess one person. They unite under the banners of hatred and fear for the purpose of doing violence and spreading evil.

And then there are the lesser demons: Indifference. Apathy. They may not participate in violence directly, but they compel those they possess to do nothing to stop violence.

Like Freddy said in The Brothers K, sometimes demons come to possess a person when violence is done to them. Last week, the violence that was done extended well beyond the walls of Pulse, well beyond the city limits of Orlando. Many of us felt the impact of the attack — knew that this hatred was directed, in a way, at us. Knew the energy was spreading out across the country. The week before, the anonymous survivor in Stanford named the ways that violence entered her life and chipped away at normalcy. Part of its viral spread was due to the fact that so many women have had similar experiences with those demons.

It seems we are possessed.

And that demon might sit in us, like a rattlesnake waiting to attack the next person. Or we find someone to bear our collective witchy energy, to become our witch, our scapegoat. Theologian and activist Walter Wink says that is what the Gerasene culture has done to the unnamed man. They chain him in such a way that he can break free so they can enact their cycle of drama — catch, escape, injury; catch, escape, injury. Wink says, the townspeople need him to act out their own violence. He bears their collective madness personally, releasing them from its symptoms. He secretly lives out the freedom to be violent that they crave. And he is more miserable for it, and the insure that he remains so.

Last week, people heatedly debated the motives of the massacre at Pulse in Orlando. Homophobia or racism? Religion or mental illness? But there are no easy answers; the name is Legion. Last week, Legion lived in Omar Mateen. The week before, we recognized Legion in Brock Turner. Last year, it was Dylann Roof.

I don’t know what formed these men, what moments — to borrow David James Duncan’s language — what moments caused energy to crash and smash around and wreck things in them. But I do believe they weren’t born so full of hate — hatred came to possess them.

Their actions have, in turn, sent out witchy energy — energy that no one deserved. Energy that crashes around, that possesses, that maims.

The demons are not to be confused with the one who is possessed by the demons.

Like the Gerasene townspeople, our larger culture participates in violent energies. These men bear the collective madness of our society — they internalize and embody our culture’s collective homophobia and racism, sexism and entitlement. When they turn violent, our culture, perhaps, experiences a vicarious release through the actions of the possessed one even as we hate the possessed one.

The good news in our gospel text today is that we don’t have to keep participating in the cycle of fear, hatred, and violence. We can find, in ourselves, those pure, deep blue lakes, and we send the demons down the banks and into their depths. Like Peter said, you can’t avoid getting nailed, but you can avoid passing the mean energy on. We have our model in the Holy Crucified One — we know that refusing to pass on the mean energy opens up the possibility of new life. But we have to know our inner terrain, we have to find the lakes.

In the last ten days, I have been brought to tears — with grief, yes, but more often with awe. I have watched people climb their inner mountains and drown hatred and fear in their lakes — sometimes in ways that are so creative and public that it feels like their lake pours out from them.

I see the demon energies die in vigils. I see them drown when Orlando costume designers volunteered to create tall, opaque angel wings for people to wear outside the victims’ funerals to create a safe space inside. In the names of the victims written on the sidewalk in downtown Seattle. In long lines of those privileged enough to give blood. In a spontaneous song outburst on a West Seattle bus of “What the World Needs Now (is Love Sweet Love)”.

It is something truly heavenly. And it is within us.

In the comments…

Where do you see lakes pour out and drown hatred?

What practices help you find your inner lakes?

Thanks for reading!

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June 14, 2016June 10, 2016

Is Scripture Fiction?: Salman Rushdie, St Paul, and the Fictions that Hide

Salman Rushdie, St Paul, and the Fictions that Hide - Is scripture fiction? - read more on KateRaeDavis.com

I recently heard a conversation between Salman Rushdie (author of The Satanic Verses) and Paul Holdengraber (interviewer of NYPL fame).

Rushdie spoke about the letters he wrote to his parents as the start of his career writing fiction:

I was a very bad letter writer. Actually, I now have a lot of letters, because my parents saved them, and so I’ve inherited them. And they’re full of apologies for not having written. All of the letters begin with, I’m really sorry I haven’t written. And then, the usual kinds of fake explanations for why I haven’t written, how busy I’ve been at boarding school, or university. In many ways, those letters were my first works of fiction, because I was very unhappy at boarding school. But I didn’t want my parents to feel that, because my mother certainly felt very sad that I was sent away from home, and wished that I hadn’t been, and my father was spending all this money and taking all this trouble to give me a foreign education in England. So I would make up how happy I was.

The idea of letters as living in the genre of fiction struck me. I think we’re taught that there’s a hard line between fiction and nonfiction, between what’s true and what isn’t. And we’re taught that genres and formats have definite places they live. Letters, we believe, are firmly in the realm of nonfiction, usually somewhere near memoir.

But I imagine Rusdhie isn’t alone in this practice of lying in letters. I imagine many of us have glossed over the ugly parts of our life for the sake of conveying overall well-being. Or scribbled a note on an office birthday card that spoke of more affection than we truly feel. Or have written a less-than-sincere “So happy for you!” on the facebook wall of your friend who just got engaged to someone who provokes feelings other than happiness.

I imagine that we frequently write fiction under the guise of sincerity.

But what really struck me was the implications of that realization on the letters of arguably one of the most famous letter-writers in history: St Paul. He wrote many of the letters that have since been canonized as Christian holy scripture. Depending on which scholars you talk to, he wrote eight to ten of the 27 books that comprise the New Testament.

And I have to imagine that there is some level of fiction in them.

Paul’s letter to the Philippian church comes to mind. While writing it, he’s in prison. Prison, in Paul’s day, was even more harsh than modern day prisons — there was no concept of “human rights” for prisoners. And yet, Paul claims that he rejoices for his imprisonment, for God uses even these circumstances for the advancement of the gospel.

Which … it might be true that he, in his moments of reflective calm and acceptance, understands his imprisonment that way. But it also really sucks to be in prison and uncertain of whether you will be alive or dead next week.

Perhaps, like Rushdie, Paul wrote the happiest version of his life he could, for the sake of the church, for the sake of their hope in Christ.

Although, unlike Rushdie, Paul doesn’t completely avoid the reality of the hardships — he doesn’t pretend he’s not in prison, doesn’t pretend prison is a happy place to be. Paul acknowledges that hardship exists, but frames that hardship in a larger narrative that extends beyond his discomfort.

Ultimately, we see adult Rushdie doing this in a way that his child letter-writer wasn’t able to. In the interview, he frames his hardship in the larger narrative of his father’s care for him, the trouble his father went to for his sake, the benefits of the British education.

Perhaps framing one’s hardships in the context of a wider narrative is not the mark of a saint, but a pastoral task, an interpersonal task. Perhaps finding the happy points is a very human tendency when communicating with those who love us and are far away. The challenge is to balance the reality of the grief with the perspective of the larger narrative in which our grief exists. The challenge is to come to hope.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed it, please hit the starred ‘like’ button below; it would mean a lot to me as it helps others see it. Or, use the social media buttons to share it wherever you hang out online.

Discuss in the comments:

When do you tell fictions as though they’re truth? Or when do you suspect others’ do?

How can you tell the difference between truth and fiction on social media?

May 30, 2016May 10, 2016

Memorial Day Reflections with Owen and Shields

Memorial Day reflections, with help from Wilfred Owens' poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" and David Shields' work "War is Beautiful" - read on KateRaeDavis.com

How Sweet & Beautiful It Is…

British poet Wilfred Owen fought in the First World War; his poems were all written in the span of a year before he was killed in action at the age of 25. Perhaps his most famous poem is titled Dulce et Decorum Est, which highlights the contrast between one moment of war to the wider narrative that is told of war:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

\\

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

\\

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

\\

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

The last lines are a Latin saying that was often quoted at the start of WWI. The translation: “How sweet and right it is to die for your country.”

“War is Beautiful”

In War is Beautiful, David Shields takes up Owen’s theme, carefully curating photos from the cover the New York Times to illustrate the ways in which the Times has led its readers to believe war reflects beauty, love, and God in Christ. Shields’s essay “War is Beautiful, They Said,” concisely articulates the ways in which the Times has taken the place of the WWI-era citizens who encouraged their youth to fight with the phrase “Dulce et decorum est.”

Fusion of Church & State

As a result of his experiences with war, Owen questioned and challenged religion, as is evident in some of his poetry. When the language of self-sacrifice and larger purpose is used by both religion and country, it is easy to equate the call to die for one’s country with the call “to die for one’s friends,” as one oft-misused scriptural verse says. When a soldier realizes that his country’s values have betrayed him, the feeling of betrayal is extended to the religion whose vocabulary and imagery the political leaders utilized. When the vocabulary of the State is the same as the vocabulary of the Church, and when the church quietly acquiesces to such misuse, betrayal by one is equal to betrayal by the other.

In his work, Shields curates a visual argument for the ways in which religious “visual vocabulary” is utilized to incite young Americans to war, or at least to encourage Americans to support the war (or perhaps, at the very least, to stop Americans from actively protesting the war). Shields suggests that in the Times, the imagery of the Church has been coopted for the purposes of the State.

The separation of Church and State is sometimes lamented as a problem in USAmerican society, but history can show us that the separation is for the purposes of protecting the integrity of the Church as much or more so than it is to protect the State. In Shields’s work, we see the modern-day effects of the fusion of these two institutions, making visible — behind the beauty — the death and degradation that come at the manipulation of religious symbols for political purposes.

God

On his section of photographs he places under the theme of “God,” Shields writes that “the Times uses its front-page war photographs to convey that a chaotic world is ultimately under control” (WiB p 9). The photos in this section, to my perception, fall in two categories.

The first: aerial shots. Obama (representative of American power) helicoptering over a city; a soldier (his face obscured so as to represent all soldiers, or perhaps American might) aiming a gun out of an aircraft.

Symbols of power that hover over a city, look over a city — benevolently or malevolently? in protection or battle? The same questions could be asked of these troops as we ask of God.

The second category: Middle Eastern people subjugating themselves — one man is nearly nude, on his knees in front of soldiers’ legs; another is kissing the hand of a soldier as one would a revered priest. They’re subjugating themselves before soldiers whose faces are always averted from the camera or out of shot; again, they could be any soldier, they are there to represent not an individual but a symbol.

The visual signs of prostration and reverence — traditionally religious symbols — are here applied to political and military might in a way that, as Shields theme title suggests, equates American forces with God.

Pieta

Another section is titled “Pieta,” which is a subject in Christian art that depicts the Virgin Mary cradling Jesus, recently dead and removed from the cross.

To summarize this theme, Shields write a succinct equation to illustrate the understanding of the Times: “War death = Christ’s death on the cross. The process of removing the body from the cross and battlefield is sacred” (WiB p 9). The images are solemn beauty; the overtones of sacrifice are palpable.

Beauty / Self-Sacrifice

Shields titles this theme simply “Beauty.” He summarizes the section as “portraits of the other…mostly women and children, beauties seeking salvation. Male sacrifice is consecrated in these faces — [they are] the rationale for going to war” (WiB p 9).

His description makes clear that this understanding of beauty is connected to self-sacrifice for the sake of a common good, or self-sacrifice for the good of another — which is, of course, one way that Christians understand Jesus on the cross (or, more accurately, the singular way in which many USAmerican Christians understand the cross).

The cameras focus on women and children, clear-eyed and suffering, often surrounded by blood or fire. They are sometimes looking into the camera as though salvation from these surroundings lies with us, the American viewer; as if their salvation is dependent upon our support of this war’s continuation.

Differentiation and Memorial Day

Whatever you believe about the political realities or necessities behind the war, I think we can recognize that the daily reality of the war experience contains layers of horror. Even for those who manage to escape physically unharmed (though, arguably, the levels of stress-induced hormones that flood the brains of our soldiers in their formative years means that it’s near impossible to have no physical impact; in a very real sense, no one leaves unharmed) — but even for those who manage to come home physically intact, there is real pain involved: the emotional pain of losing peers, the trauma of living amidst death, the survivor’s guilt.

I know many Christians view war as a necessary evil in our world. Perhaps they’re right. But even so, Shields’s work suggests to me that for Christians to allow the political powers to use our imagery and symbols is to allow the State to displace the Church. To quietly allow the State to serve Death using the symbols that are meant for Life is a betrayal of the gospel.

If war is a necessary evil for the State, let us keep the Church intact so that those who come home from war still have safe place in society, a place that has not betrayed them.

Christ was meant to be the last sacrifice. To glorify soldiers as sacrifices for our society only calls us back to the cross, to a recognition of the two millennia that have passed in which we have failed to construct a society that recognizes Christ as the final sacrifice. Perhaps not only on Memorial Day, but every day, we can honor the soldiers who gave their lives by working for peace, by constructing a society which no longer demands their sacrifice.

Until that day, may we not only remember the soldiers who gave their lives, but also witness to our returning veterans — not only in their triumphs, but in their loss and grief.

May we free them from being anonymous symbols of power on our newspapers in order that they might become wholly human in all beauty and brokenness.

May we help work alongside them to re-connect to the goodness, light, and life that is in the world and in our hearts and theirs.

May we listen and witness to whatever shards of their experiences they’re able and willing to entrust to us, and may we do so as faithfully, attentively, and gently as we witness the breaking of the bread.

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For discussion:

What would need to be included in a photo of modern war for it to be more honest? What would need to be left out, or what editing left undone?

April 12, 2016April 10, 2016

Prayer for Life & Humanity in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Prayer

This prayer is a quiet and quick murmur of desperation upon learning of the start of war, uttered by the protagonist Francie Nolan in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn:

“Dear God,” she prayed, “let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry . . . have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere–be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.”

It’s a prayer for attentiveness, for awareness, for full embodiment. An honest prayer to be fully alive.

Fully Human

We Christians talk about the two natures of Christ; how Christ was “fully God and fully human” at the same time. And I think we often take the humanity for granted; he had a body, and that was enough to call him human. But I wonder if full humanity is something to attain, like wisdom and mindfulness.

I wonder if part of what Francie is praying for here is to become more fully human by being attentive to every moment of embodied life.

Which is what makes it a Christian prayer. Not because it starts with “Dear God,” (which prayer from any religion would do in translation). It’s a Christian prayer because she prays with a foundation in the belief of the importance of incarnation — the incarnation of her own self. Because God made flesh and named it good, and God chose to take on flesh and be embodied with us.

For discussion: Have you ever had moments that gave you a similar desire for life? What was it?

March 22, 2016March 20, 2016

“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” & The Image of God

The Image of God

The theology of the imago Dei, or image of God, holds that humans, being created by the divine, hold the image of their Creator within themselves.

Over the centuries, there has been quite a bit of discussion as to what exactly it means to be image-bearers. Perhaps the image is innate to every human; perhaps a human must first be in relationship with God before becoming an image-bearer. Perhaps the image is held fully in each person; each person carries a full image of God. Perhaps the image is a trait shared by all humanity (often this argument names that trait as capital-R Reason, though obviously people carry that trait to different extents; others have argued that the trait is relational, or the capacity for meaningful relationship). Perhaps the image is collective — all of humanity, together, is the image of God.

Francie Nolan: Fully Human, Fully Image-Bearing

In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith quietly addresses the debates around imago Dei through her protagonist, Francie. After detailing the background and character of the Rommelys (Francie’s maternal family) and the Nolans (her paternal family), the section concludes with these paragraphs:

“And the child, Francie Nolan, was of all the Rommelys and all the Nolans. She had the violent weaknesses and passion for beauty of the shanty Nolans. She was a mosaic of her grandmother Rommely’s mysticism, her tale-telling, her great belief in everything and her compassion for the weak ones. She had a lot of her grandfather Rommely’s cruel will. She had some of her Aunt Evy’s talent for mimicking, some of Ruthie Nolan’s possessiveness. She had Aunt Sissy’s love for life and her love for children. She had Johnny’s sentimentality without his good looks. She had all of Katie’s soft ways and only half of the invisible steel of Katie. She was made up of all of these good and these bad things.

She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie’s secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk.

She was all of these things and of something more that did not come from the Rommelys nor the Nolans, the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only–the something different from anyone else in the two families. It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life–the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.” (p72-73)

Smith’s narrator asserts that there is a unique image that each person holds; each “something” is a gift of God.

One thing I love about this passage is that it doesn’t deny the “bad things” and the ways cruelty, brokenness, despair, and shame are handed down from generation to generation.

What I love even more is the way that this passage assumes God’s presence in a person. Smith nullifies the question of whether a person must be in relationship with God in order to carry the image of God.

Before birth or at birth, God put the “something” into Francie, so Francie is always already in relationship with God. She is in relationship as the receiver of this gift, as a bearer of the image. Even when she disavows God, she is still embodying that “something different,” still holding the lovingly wrapped package that God gave uniquely to her.

For discussion: If this narrator were writing about our life, what would be in the paragraph of what you inherited from your family? What would be in the paragraph about the “more,” the other influences in life?

Respond in the comments!

March 8, 2016June 8, 2019

The Book of Uncommon Prayer & How to Pray Without Ceasing

Brian Doyle's "A Book of Uncommon Prayer" & How to Pray Without Ceasing - on Literate Theology / Kate Rae Davis

The title first caught my eye: The Book of Uncommon Prayer. I’m a lover of the Book of Common Prayer, and I can’t resist a hint of irreverence. The table of contents promised prayers for “cashiers and checkout-counter folks” and for “muddy paw prints on the kitchen floor;” prayers for every layer of modern human life, from the mundane presence of port-a-potties to the heartbreaking reality of people whose dads left them as kids.

I had expected to find short blessings that could be spoken in strange places or at times when our own BCP feels a little stiff or distant. What I actually encountered was page after page of Doyle’s sincere, most-well-intentioned thought-rambles.

To name his prayers as ramblings may sound dismissive, but it’s meant in the holiest of senses. Doyle writes as though he’s the scribe of the voice that narrates the thoughts in our heads — that kind of focused run-on-sentence that deals with life as it comes, that helps us narrate our days and our identities, that talks us into wanting the best for others.

When reading his “Prayer for the Men & Women Who Huddle Inside Vast Rain Slickers All Day Holding Up STOP Signs at Construction Sites & Never Appear to Shriek in Despair & Exhaustion,” it felt as though I myself were behind the wheel of a car on a rainy day, idling past one of those workers, and that these are the thoughts that may go through my head. “I pray for warmth for you. Less rain. No idiot drivers whizzing past… I pray that you are getting paid decent wages.”

The real gift of Doyle’s work to us is not the words of the prayers themselves, which I doubt will ever be read over bowed heads at family gatherings. Rather, his gift is the recognition that all thought is prayer. And with that, the recognition that some thoughts are perhaps more worthy prayers than others.

St Paul reminds us to “pray without ceasing,” to pray “at all times with all kinds of prayers and requests.” I’ve heard people say that Paul was exaggerating, that he certainly didn’t mean to pray all the time, just to pray a lot.

But what if Paul did mean what he wrote?

What if the voice in my head could be nudged into giving up its criticisms and its concern for my schedule and its constant readying for the next thing, and instead became attuned to the people, animals, places, and items in its midst? What if my inner critic was re-formed into a silent chaplain?

Doyle’s work reminds readers how many opportunities we have to bless the world as beings and things come into our sight each day. We each have an unlimited abundance of blessing to offer.

From where I’m sitting, I can send blessings of gratitude on my dog for his (not entirely necessary) watchfulness; blessings on those who grew, picked, and dried the tea leaves in my cup; a prayer for good working conditions and fair wages for those who built my computer; a prayer of deep gratitude to anyone who takes the time to read my words; and of course, a prayer of appreciation that Brian Doyle reminded me of the power of my prayers.

These prayers may do nothing for their recipients, though we can hope alongside Doyle that they may feel a surge of joy for reasons they do not know. But the prayers will undoubtedly do something for us who mumble them, instilling us with gratitude, forming us to notice the whispered cries for justice, orienting us towards love.

So: a blessing on Brian Doyle, who didn’t at all punt it like he was afraid he would; who was transparent in his humanity for the sake of his readers; who not only gave us some lovely thoughts but more importantly showed us how it’s done. I pray the process of writing it was at least as formative as the process of reading it has been. I pray he’s proud of his work, and not too self-conscious about letting all us readers inside his head and his heart. And I pray he feels a surge of joy right now for reasons he does not know. And so: Amen.

Questions: What people, pets, or items call for your blessing in your immediate vicinity? Share in the comments below.

February 18, 2016March 24, 2016

Gender & God in the Hunger Games

Gender and God in the Hunger Games - Literate Theology / Kate Rae Davis

Questions of Gender Identity

Our society struggles with how to understand gender identity.

Some people have concrete ideas of what it means to be a man or a woman while others question if there are any traits essential to gender. Each group seems to be attempting to bend society to their preferences, whether for stricter gender conformity or for a move towards androgyny or multiplicity.

In Christian theology, questions of gender are taking place not only horizontally in society, but also vertically: is God masculine or feminine? Is it acceptable to use both feminine and masculine pronouns when referring to God? Might it even be preferable to do so?

In the first novel of her Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins presents an image of a post-gender society that helps us imagine the Kingdom of God as a reality. In this dystopian society, individuals live out of true identity without pressure to conform to a predetermined concept of gender identity.

Gender Identity in Katniss & Peeta

The main characters of The Hunger Games, Katniss and Peeta, give a glimpse of gender within the Kingdom of God. They do not conform the gender norms that exist in of our current society, and thus question the existence of such societal norms.

Peeta, an artistically gifted baker, values connection over hierarchy and bonds through shared feelings at least as much as shared experiences — qualities considered feminine by contemporary USAmerican society. Because of his traditionally feminine qualities, many are interested in Peeta’s portrayal of feminized masculinity; some reviewers have even criticized Collins for having unfavorably over-feminized a lead character.

Katniss is a hunter. She is stoic and emotionally distant, at times out-of-touch with her own emotions and those of others.

It is easy to view the relationship between Katniss and Peeta as a gender-role reversal. In their vocations, they go against the norms. In their emotional awareness and capacity, they defy our expectations. However, such statements assume that the culturally constructed norms of gender we hold today are in some way intrinsic to males and females.

Reviewers attempting to place our current understanding of gender onto Peeta and Katniss have a hard time of it. Writing for Bitch Media, Kelsey Wallace concludes her character evaluation of Peeta: “If Gale is the bad boy, Peeta is, well, something else. Not the good boy exactly, but maybe the nice boy.” In some way, Peeta resists categorization.

Gender Identity in Panem

Indeed, the entire society of Panem seems to resist categorization to the extent that it could be described as post-gender. In District Twelve, survival matters more than conformity so much so that no one seems surprised by a girl who ventures outside the protection of the fence to hunt and gather. The other spectrum of society, in the Capitol, also defies our current gender norms, as both men and women seem to be equally concerned with fashion and makeup.

Rather than imposing our society onto Panem and its inhabitants, we would be wise to allow the text to question our internalized understanding of gender roles. Why are we, the readers, surprised by a female archer, or a man in makeup? Why are some of us angered by Peeta’s vulnerability, or by Katniss’s inability to intuit Peeta’s emotions? We have been so indoctrinated by the gender norms of our culture that we can’t even see past them when another society, another way of being, is presented.

Identity Beyond Gender

Collins offers her readers a new way of looking at gender. While Katniss is preparing for the pre-Games interview, she is trying to figure out how best to present herself: “charming? Aloof? Fierce? … I’m too ‘vulnerable’ for ferocity. I’m not witty. Funny. Sexy. Or mysterious.” Unable to categorize herself in either (from today’s standpoint) feminine or masculine roles, she vents to her stylist: “I just can’t be one of those people [my coach] wants me to be.” Like many individuals in today’s world, Katniss just can’t force herself to fit into a culturally-dictated cookie-cutter role, regardless of its femininity or masculinity.

Cinna offers a solution to both Katniss and the reader that is at once obvious and beautiful:

“Why don’t you just be yourself?”

Amidst the questions of Katniss’s combination of masculine and feminine traits and Peeta’s feminized depiction, critics have missed Cinna’s prophecy. Is Katniss a masculine woman? Is Peeta a feminine man? Within the world of the novel, the questions don’t apply: Katniss is Katniss; Peeta is Peeta. The characters are fully themselves, in the full complexity of their gender.

The Identity of God

Personification

The God of the Bible includes both feminine and masculine traits. In the beginning, God creates “male and female” in the image of God’s self. Scripture describes God with masculine images such as father (e.g., Hosea 11:1) and king (e.g., Psalm 29:10), as well as feminine depictions such as mother (e.g., Isaiah 66:13).

Surely, this is a God whose identity is reflected by both men and women. God’s gender is carried by the diversity of masculine and feminine individuals; it feels safe to imagine that the Kingdom of God will not only tolerate masculine and feminine genders but will accept and celebrate such diversity.

And yet, such a view, as hopeful as it sounds, is too limited, too unimaginative. The God of scripture includes and transcends gender. From the anthropomorphic images of God as father, king, and mother, we could easily picture God as a male or female figure. However, to do so would be to misconstrue the characteristic being invoked.

As Hebrew scholar David Stein notes, “Personification was employed as a vehicle to convey a statement about deity—and especially about one’s relationship with deity.” What is being invoked in the image of father or mother is an aspect of relationship, a situational similarity, rather than the full, embodied, engendered being.

Such an understanding of the text gives a clearer understanding of what the scriptural author wants to invoke in the audience. It also clarifies seemingly paradoxical images, such as “suck at the breast of kings”, in which a female biological function of nursing is ascribed to male rulers. To understand the personifications of God too literally means to deny the grand all-ness of a Divinity that transcends all human boundaries and definition, including gender.

Beyond Every Human Category

Genesis 1 not only sets the stage for the entire story, it introduces the character and event of God with a powerful first impression of a being who is beyond every human category. This God creates and orders the universe with a word; it is part of this deity’s identity to surpass all traits of humans, meaning that this being is almost nothing like a human. Such a God is so other that “the audience not only receives no warrant to ascribe social gender, but would be hard pressed to do so,” writes Stein.

Just as Collins’s created society of Panem does not ask questions of Katniss’s nor Peeta’s gender, the audience of scripture receives no warrant to ascribe social gender to God. Those who do have an equally hard time, as demonstrated above. Stein, emphasizing the importance of first impressions, summarizes the rule for understanding the transcendent inclusiveness of God with regards to gender: “What is inappropriate to the opening, do not do what’s joined to it—that is, the whole Torah.”

How, then, should gender be understood in a Kingdom that lives under a God who is introduced to be beyond human understanding?

Why Don’t You Just Be Yourself?

Christian theologians have been easily sidetracked by our own understandings of gender and identity in the debate over God’s masculine and feminine descriptions. Some attempt to equally disperse masculine and feminine pronouns, others try to discern which parts of the Trinity are which gender. As a solution, to paraphrase Cinna, why don’t we just let God be God?

If Christians are to read Scripture to understand the character of God, as the people of ancient Israel did, we must not allow vision to be clouded by the predominant culture’s misunderstandings and false truths. Doing so would be to superimpose our paradigm onto God, effectively killing the living God and creating an idol in humanity’s image. Just as readers of The Hunger Games can fully appreciate the narrative by allowing Katniss and Peeta to live out of their truest selves, so should even the most critical reader of scripture allow God to be the true God, without attempts to superimpose a gendered box onto ~~Her/Him~~ God.

A Kingdom Understanding of Gender

A Kingdom understanding of gender must reflect a God who acts uniquely and creates humanity in God’s image.

Although a dystopia, Panem presents a society that appears to be largely beyond concerns of gender roles, whether such nonchalance is the result of desperate survival, as it is in District Twelve, or boredom and body decoration, as it is in the Capitol. In Panem, people are intrigued and impressed by the full identity of Katniss, not only that she is at once strong and female. Even more so, the audience of the Games is captivated by Peeta’s emotional vulnerability and intuitive ability to connect, and not only because he is a man doing so. Rather than praising individuals for breaking gender boundaries, Panem is a society that allows individuals to live out of their truest identity and understanding of self.

May we anticipate a Kingdom in which we are accepted and celebrated for living out of our true self rather than a societal expectation, in which the complexity of an individual’s gender-sex alignment is secondary to the fullness and flourishing of individual identity.

Questions: Did you have any reactions to the gender of Peeta or Katniss while reading/viewing The Hunger Games? What did that reaction tell you about yourself and how you understand gender? What would you do with your life if it didn’t make you a “bad woman/man”?

October 27, 2015January 12, 2016

The Tao of Pooh: Sources of Wisdom

I purchased this book when I saw it used after it had been recommended to me by multiple people due to my then-fondness for all things Winnie the Pooh — a fact which should date how long I’ve been meaning to read it. And the multiple recommendations and the time it’s been with me and the energy of moving it from one place to another has all contributed to a bit of a sense of overhype.

I had wanted Hoff to draw parallels in the particular, to articulate specific intersections between taoism and these stories from the Hundred Acre Wood. Instead, he explains a taoist principle and then provides a quote or story from A. A. Milne’s work. And that’s it. He provides these sweeping stories and leaves the readers to draw their own connections. At times, I appreciated the freedom; more often, I felt abandoned — like he had an interesting thesis and got lazy in actually proving it, so instead he just laid out the evidence and said, “Here! See?”

Though he fails to thoughtfully execute the idea, his intuition is good. In the foreword, Hoff writes that he was in a conversation about the historical masters of wisdom when someone argued that they all come from the East; Hoff differed. He went to Milne’s work as an example of a wise Western Taoist.

That his example of Western wisdom is found in children’s stories is significant, and unusual for Western thinkers. I imagine that for many readers, The Tao of Pooh is the first work that took seriously a beloved children’s figure and helped explain why that figure was so important in their lives.

Perhaps this is the greatest gift that Hoff gives his readers: a certainty that wisdom exists not only in the West, but in children’s stories, in fantastical tales, and made-up realms.

Indeed, we humans are always “doing” theology. We can’t help but convey our understanding of the world in every act, with every word, and within every story. Of course we tell our theology to our children in the stories we share with them; indeed, this may be some of the most dense and raw theology. The created worlds in children’s stories often contain aspects of magic or make-believe, which is a condensed way to talk about realities. For one relevant example,”heffalumps and woozles” is a condensed way to talk about all the things in the world that make us feel uncertain about our security, anything from robbers to natural disasters. It’s a silly-while-serious way to introduce children to a difficult concept: there exists in the world something that is not for your best interests. In adult theology, we have another condensed way to talk about this concept: evil.

Storytellers want children to understand the world the same way we do and help them find their place in it. This is why so many new parents are excited to build their child’s bookshelf; they know they’re stocking their child’s imagination with lessons and beliefs about the way the world works.

Perhaps we’d do better to examine children’s stories more carefully and to choose which beliefs of the world we hand on to the next generations. Do you want your children (nieces, nephews, neighbor’s kids) to believe the world is fundamentally safe or unsafe? for them or against them? easy or challenging? What stories do you know of that convey these understandings of the world?