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.

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 16, 2016June 13, 2016

The Way We (Don’t) Talk About Sin Is Hurting Us

The ways we talk about sin (and the ways we avoid talking about sin) are hurting ourselves and each other - read more on KateRaeDavis.com

The previous posts in this series may have seemed pessimistic. Starting a conversation on the human condition with sin and failure to receive God’s gifts seems like cynicisms. Humans are capable of great acts of reconciliation, compassion, and love. Christians have a long history of working to extend love to others just as God extended it to us. Why focus on the dark side when light exists?

Sin may seem irrelevant to who we are called to be. But sin remains a vital category not only in Christian theology but in human development. It’s happy to focus on salvation and redemption and grace. But salvation stories are meaningless without knowing what it is we’re being given grace in response to, or what we’re being saved or redeemed from.

Sin is anything that keeps us from being fully alive in our humanity.

Sin is anything that keeps us from loving others in their full humanity. So sin is always part of the Christian conversation. It’s the backdrop that makes noticing light possible.

Whenever salvation or grace is preached, what is implicit is the notion of salvation from a state of being, or grace with regards to a tendency. The word ‘sin’ may not be used, but its presence is assumed when we use the words like salvation, redemption, and grace.

It’s really easy to forget that salvation was extended to us in the midst of sinfulness. I know that I forget about what my life used to be like. And that forgetfulness is a great risk to ourselves. When we forget the ways we harm others and ourselves, we tend to return to those ways.

So sin is a diagnosis, a vocabulary, a name, a narrative for the ways in which we fail to live into our salvation, the ways we fail to live in grace, the ways we fail to be fully human. Without a solid understanding of sin, our attempts to move toward health, wholeness, and holiness do more harm than good.

Sinful behavior is contrasted with interpretations of Christlikeness.

When people are urged to be more Christlike, the qualities that define “Christlikeness” are interpreted from scripture.

Let me repeat: they’re interpreted from scripture. They’re not just from scripture. The stories are interpreted, and then they’re applied to our lives and world today — which is also an act of interpretation. If those interpretations are limited, the grace and salvation preached will be similarly limited.

And let’s be honest, interpretations are always going to be limited. Each human — whoever is doing the interpreting — has a very particular worldview. Each human is only able to see the world from their own stance. If they’re really good at listening, maybe they can imagine a few different perspectives.

There is no entirely objective “view from nowhere.” There can be no fully sensitive, diverse, informed “view from everywhere.” Unless you’re God.

And here’s the issue: to whatever degree an interpretation is limited, it holds the potential to be destructive.

So it’s a problem that only men have been allowed to participate in theological conversations in recent, erm, millennia. Women’s experience has been largely silenced.

This silencing is especially noticeable in conversations about sin.

Many of the “deadly sins” are from places of privilege.

Gluttony assumes you have access to food, greed assumes you have access to resources, pride implies you have a sense of self and agency.

But these sins just don’t really apply when you aren’t in a position of power. I’ll focus on pride, since it’s the one that the Western world largely speaks of it as if it’s the root of all sin. Pride assumes you have access to conversations and are allowed to “take up space” — and so you should be quieter, humbler, relationally “smaller” to make room for others and to submit to others. Great, if you’re a man with markers of privilege and status.

Less great if you’re a woman who has limited access and is already so relationally “small” as to be nonexistent. For generations, women have heard from preachers and pastors to be humble and to submit to others. If she’s having a fight with a friend, be humble and sumbit to your friend. If she’s being abused at home, be humble and submit to your husband. Sex against your will? Be humble and submit.

This isn’t working.

Or rather, it’s working in the sense that it functions to uphold the current power structures. It’s working, right now, for straight white men.

The problem is diagnosed as pride and the solution only perpetuates the pain, and the church insists that the problem is still pride. That’s crazy. That’d be like your doctor insisting that you need to be leeched because you have a blood disease — when your issue is that you’re bleeding out. It’s time to re-evaluate the problem and get a new diagnosis.

Maybe the thing that is supposed to save us — humility and submission — actually is itself the sin. And maybe recognizing that is really good news because it opens up the possibility of salvation.

That’s been true in my life. And I found that my liberating experience is shared by others who had internalized our culture’s value of humility and submission (or in other circles, “self-giving” or “self-sacrifice”). Those others are mostly women and people of sex and gender diversity, which is telling — we’re the people that didn’t have voices in theological conversations about sin and pride.

We need to start by recognizing that sinful behaviors do not vanish upon baptism or speaking the Jesus prayer.

Even in dramatic conversion experiences, people aren’t entirely freed from sin. I’m certainly not.

Sinful behaviors persist because sin is not only a behavior, but also a state that preconditions all behaviors.

It is not enough to be converted to a new way of life once. We must be converted freshly every day – at times it feels we must be converted every hour – and continuously re-oriented toward the goal. The goal, by the way, is love of God and neighbor.

We must know the character that we hope to develop or else we labor in vain. Roberta Bondi says “we must not simply aim at love in general; we must have a little knowledge of the qualities that lead to the love we want…In the same way, we must also know what we are to avoid.”

We can best move toward the goal of love if we can anticipate the blockages we will face. We need to develop language and sight for areas to which we have been blind.

We name sins, we confess the truth of our reality, not to make us more lovable or more acceptable in God’s sight. We confess our particular sins as a step forward in our freedom to love.

Thanks for reading! To never miss a post in the series — or any post ever — sign up to have a weekly summary of posts delivered right to your inbox:

In the comments:

Have you ever been told to “be humble / submit / self-give / self-sacrifice” and felt something inside yourself — hope, agency, safety — wither? What did it do to your relationship with God? with the Church?

June 9, 2016June 8, 2016

How to Understand Relationship With God

What relationship do you mean to evoke when you say “God”?

I don’t think any of us mean the bearded old guy on a cloud. At last not on purpose.

We’ve moved away from rulership metaphors, for the most part. Which makes sense. “King” and “Lord” don’t carry a lot of metaphorical weight with people who elect their political leadership.

Many Christians are moving away from the parental imagery of Father (and of Mother, for that matter). Blame it on Freud, but we’re in an age of psychological awareness. As large groups of people work on to articulate the ways in which their parents fall far short of divine behavior, it will continue to get more problematic to evoke parental imagery for God.

So we’re left wondering: how do we understand this divine, invisible, felt force that moves through the cosmos? What metaphor or analogy can we use for something beyond all understanding? What language can we put to something so profoundly experiential?

The Good Gift Giver

I’ve settled on one image that feels right and true: God is the giver of good gifts.

Throughout scripture we read that God gives strength, wisdom, and all that is good. For just a short list, see Psalm 29:11; Psalm 85:12; Proverbs 2:6; Matthew 7:11; James 1:5; James 1:17. That list could be really long. The act of giving is an essential characteristic of God and is made incarnational in Jesus.

Kathryn Tanner writes about God as the giver of good gifts. She recognizes that the God-made-flesh moment is what unites humanity and God. Tanner says that in this uniting work, “God gives everything necessary. … God contributes all the elements. … God gives completely to us.”

Sacrifice is no longer required of humanity. There is nothing to sacrifice. In a great reversal of expectations, God has provided and offered all the elements of sacrifice as a gift to humanity. You could even go so far as to say that it is impossible for us to truly sacrifice to God, for “God needs nothing but wants to give all.” The Christian God is “a God of gift-giving abundance.”

Receiving Gifts

I struggle with this conception of God as the giver of everything.

If God provides every aspect of the sacrifice needed for my atonement, what is left for me to give? It’s not that attending church services or spending time in daily devotions is insufficient, it’s that it’s unnecessary to the atoning project. How do we participate in a relationship if God has done all that needs doing?

I think the first step for us is to recognize the goodness of the gifts.

And then to respond with gracious receptivity and surrender. To offer, as Tanner says, “the return to God of prior gifts on God’s part to us … as an appropriate act of thanksgiving.”

Our response to God’s gifts is to return those gifts for the purpose of God. As Ignatius phrased it in prayer:

“Take and receive, Lord, my entire liberty, my memory, my understanding… All that I am and have you have given to me, and I give it all back to you to be disposed of according to your good pleasure.”

Gifts are received and returned to God when we use the gifts to the pleasure of God. I think this takes the form of using the gifts to the service and benefit of humanity (but that’s a topic of its own lengthy post).

There are a thousand examples of gifts being given back in ways to please God. A gift of innovation that is used to restore creation; a gift for joy and laughter that is shared to bring joy to others; a gift for organizing resources used to care for those in need.

Not Receiving Gifts

And then there are ways in which we don’t accept and return God’s gifts.

We refuse rather than receive. We misuse rather than return. That is, we sin.

Sin is shorthand for what keeps us from relationship with God. In this image, sin is shorthand for the ways in which we fail to receive or use God’s good gifts.

Refusing Gifts

We refuse gifts because of blockages.

Perhaps we’re unable to receive because our hands are full of what has been handed from elsewhere.

Perhaps our hands are forcefully closed or our arms will not risk outstretching to receive.

Or we have been handed stones in the past and we won’t risk asking for bread again.

Or we have been socially conditioned to view ourselves as unworthy of good gifts.

We refuse gifts because of blindness.

Perhaps we don’t notice what is offered.

Or perhaps we don’t recognize that the gift is good.

Or we don’t believe it’s freely offered, suspecting hidden strings attached.

Or perhaps we’re distracted.

And in all of this, God remains the giver. Tanner is adamant: the “gift is still being offered even as we turn away from it in sin.”

Misusing Gifts

When we successfully receive a gift, our participation is not done. Sometimes we misuse the gifts that have been given to us.

A gift can be used for purposes other than for what was designed or intended. Like a kid who asks for a water gun that is then used to torment the neighbor girl, sometimes gifts aren’t used as they were intended. Not that I’m speaking from personal experience or anything…

A gift can be used in its right function (the gun shoots water), but for ill purposes (torment instead of fun, surprise instead of consenting play). In a spiritual sense, a gift might be used for ill ends such as personal glory, self-promotion, or financial prosperity rather than for the good of others.

Or, more subtle but perhaps equally sinister is the person who claims that their gifts originate within their own self. The person who refuses to acknowledge that there was any gifting involved.

Or, a gift can be misused through its destruction in inappropriate sacrifice.

Justin Martyr writes: “We have been taught that the only honor that is worthy of [God] is not to consume by fire what he has brought into being for our sustenance, but to use it for ourselves and those who need.”

Martyr’s words remind me of a story of an African man who heard of Jesus’s sacrifice and that no other sacrifices were necessary. So he stopped sacrificing his animals, and was better able to feed his community. He laughed, “Jesus saves…the chickens and the goats!”

The sacrificial misuse of spiritual gifts often occurs through misunderstanding the purpose of gifts. Women, I think, are socially conditioned to destroy what is given. Women with gifts of leadership or prophecy or any number of things are told to “sacrifice” for the sake of being a good wife/mother/Christian. She is being lied to about the essential nature of her sex and about the appropriate use of her gifts.

Systems of Sin

When gifts are refused or misused, we tend to focus on individual choice. Or perhaps we’re generous — we speak in terms of predisposition, family patterns, and circumstances.

But at least as important as the individual is the reality of the wider system.

We all live and move within layers of systems. Often unknowingly, or unquestioningly. Family systems, yes, but also cultural norms, socializations (what is “polite” or “proper”), societal roles. And these systems are influenced by religious teachings, traditions, doctrines, and ways of interpreting scripture. All of these influence how and whether we respond to the gifts of God.

In a systemic sense, we are all complicit in the sins of the individual, because we have created a context in which sin may be a reasonable or beneficial option.

That might sound far-fetched, or like too much guilt. But consider, for instance, the sin of murder: we’ve created a context in which weapons of many sorts are readily available. In the US, we’ve even come up with legal terms we view as sacred: Self Defense. As though the text reads, “Thou shalt not kill, unless in the circumstances that murder is a countermeasure in order to defend the health and well-being of oneself or another.”

We’ve created a context in which murder is reasonable.

And even if we question that norm, we are complicit. At least, I am, every moment that I’m not trying to change the system.

If that feels extreme, consider the sin of theft. We’ve participated in circumstances in which people starve and won’t be fed. This is true even if our participation is through a lack of action to change anything — I haven’t welcomed to my dinner table any young adults who have aged out of the foster system or mentally ill persons with no home to return to. So I’m complicit.

Grace

Madeleine L’Engle:

“It is no coincidence that the root word of whole, health, heal, holy is hale (as in hale and hearty). If we are healed, we become whole; we are hale and hearty; we are holy. The marvelous thing is that this holiness is nothing we can earn. …It is nothing we can do in this do-it-yourself world. It is gift, sheer gift, waiting there to be recognized and received.”

We are each gifted with a seed life that carries the potential to flourish. It is the very fullness of our humanity that is “waiting to be recognized and received.”

Grace is the offering of the seed.

Grace, then, is not an add-on to our human condition. Grace is essential to human nature.

Kathryn Tanner says “humans are created to operate with the gift of God’s grace.” God’s choices are not bound by time, so they’re not sequential. God didn’t create humans and then have to come up with the solution of grace to address the problem of sin.

Instead, God’s choices are wholly formed from the outset. God willed and created humanity to be, at once, sinful and graced. Grace was always part of the design.

Receiving Grace

We receive our identities as “selves-in-relation.” We receive identity from being in relationship with God and neighbor.

For a fully human life, we each must recognize relationship, our own agency to act in the world, and the fact that our agency is tied to relationship. We must recognize that that our abilities are rooted outside our own self-understanding and capacities.

A Christian understanding of identity recognizes that any person’s identity can only be known in part by anyone other than God. This includes recognizing that we each only know our own self in part.

I am more than I can know I am.

We will always be more than we are capable of understanding. Anglican Father Williams explains that faith is the opposite to sin:

“[Faith] consists in the awareness that I am more than I know. …Such faith cannot be contrived. If it were contrivable, if it were something I could create in myself…then it would not be faith. It would be works—my organizing the self I know. That faith can only be the gift of God emphasizes the scandal of our human condition—the scandal of our absolute dependence upon [God]. … This will enable me to assimilate aspects of my being which hitherto I have kept at arm’s length. My awareness of what I am will grow, and the more it grows the less shall I be the slave of sin.“

Faith and grace are deeply related gifts of God. Faith and grace are necessary gifts to receive in order to flourish in our identities.

Roberta Bondi says the early Christians understood grace as “simply God’s help in seeing and knowing the world, ourselves, God, and other people in such a way that love is made possible.”

Fully human selves-in-relation rest in faith and grace. Without faith and grace, a human is less than fully alive — is in sin.

Biblical theologian Mark Biddle writes about this. He says that although “human beings exist only in relationship” and cannot act without risking damage to the relationship, we must also individually develop in order to grow into full personhood. This process of development “is unfortunately rife with opportunities to be stunted by perversion and suppression: sin.”

I had a professor who said it this way: “It is not enough to be a self that is only a self-in-relation.”

In contrast to a graced life of wholeness and holiness is sin. Sin is being less than fully human — being a self that eschews relationship or being a self that is only in relation. Sin blocks human wholeness and holiness through disrupting the cultivation of self. Sin stops human wholeness and holiness through obstructing the cultivation of relationship. Sin disrupts human wholeness and holiness through blocking grace.

This, I believe, is a foundation stone of an understanding of the human condition.

Share in the comments:

What metaphor best describes your relationship to God?

What is your response to understanding God as a gift-giver? How do you think you receive?

To follow the rest of this series, make sure to sign up for once-a-week notifications, right to your inbox. The whole series is available here.

*Kathryn Tanner quotes from Christ the Key, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

*Justin Martyr, “The First Apology,” trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (eds.), Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. I, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 166.

*Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith & Art, (Wheaton, IL: H. Shaw, 1980), 60-61.

*Harry Abbott Williams, “Theology and Self-Awareness,” in Soundings: Essays Concerning Christian Understanding, edited by Alexander Roper Vidler, (Cambridge, UK: University Press, 1962), 90.

*Mark E. Biddle, “Sin: Failure to Embrace Authentic Freeodm” in Missing the Mark: Sin and Its Consequences in Biblical Theology, (Nashville, TN: Abindgon, 2005), 66.

*Roberta Bondi, To Love as God Loves: Conversations with the Early Church, (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1987), 37.

June 2, 2016June 8, 2019

The Liberating Good News of My Sin

I’d always been taught that pride is bad. The worst bad. The root of all bad. The core human sin.

In school, the summation of many stories came down to: “Pride cometh before the fall.” In church, the response to gossip was the same. There was nothing worse one could be than to be prideful.

Which meant, of course, that there was nothing better that one could aspire to be than humble.

“It was pride that changed angels into devils,” wrote Saint Augustine. “It is humility that makes men as angels.”

So it was inevitable that when I placed my needs before the desires of others, I would feel guilty. The teachings and practices of my church and wider culture encouraged me to be selfless, self-less, without a self.

My dad couldn’t understand why it took me years to leave an abusive relationship. Now I’m able to narrate: of course it did. Some unarticulated part of my character had been formed to believe that, in wanting safety for myself, I wasn’t loving him enough, I was being selfish, I wasn’t giving enough of my self.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I learned of a concept that, in the 1950s, was first named “feminine sin.” I immediately recognized it as offering me a particular grace. “Feminine sin” is the opposite of pride. It is, as Valerie Saiving Goldstein put it, is “diffuseness, triviality, and lack of a sense of self.”[1]

And that was good news.

I recognize that for many people, the topic of sin doesn’t generally fall under the category of good news. But this, for me, was liberating; a sparrow released from my ribcage.

To name self-less-ness as sin freed me from these destructive ways of life that I had been told were necessary, even holy. Understanding my silence as sin freed me from the shame of having my own opinions. Understanding passivity as sin freed me from the guilt of leaving abusive relationships, the guilt of failing to “self-sacrifice” more.

The moment these behaviors were named as sin, I was freed from masochism that had been parading as virtue.

I had been living sinfully, but my sin was not pride. Truthfully, the diagnosis of pride only encouraged my sinful behavior, pushing me deeper into abnegating my agency and underdeveloping my self. This was the great betrayal of the theologies I had been given: that what I had been told would save me is what led me further into sin.

I realized that for many of my (male) peers, even ones in seminary with me, the naming of sin was not experienced as good news, and I struggled to articulate why it was for me.

I began to explore feminist theologies of sin. In doing that research, I became increasingly aware of the tendency to split humanity into a spectrum of identities based on sex (male/female biology) or gender (masculine/feminine cultural constructs).[2]

In some feminist theologies, masculine sin (pride) and “feminine sin” are entirely isolated from one another, as though two mutually exclusive categories, or else were put in opposition to one another.

In other feminist theologies, there are arguments for an androgynous understanding of the human condition. These were often formed as a defense against essentialism, the belief that gender traits are inherent to the sex with which we associate them. In other words, that men are inherently, in their essence, strong, violent, and aggressive, whereas women are inherently weak, meek, and submissive.

These theologies argued for androgyny as though the bodies in which we live (sex) and the ways in which our society structures the ways in which we understand our identities (gender) do not carry any weight in the conversation or in our lives.

I longed for an understanding of sin that made sense of my liberation. I longed for an understanding of sin that acknowledged my body and my life. I longed for a way to understand sin that spoke to the way my culture encouraged me to sin on the basis of my sex. I longed for a theology that asked what the human condition is, in all its sexed and gendered complexity, even as it asked what masculine and feminine components might be.[3]

There are masculine and feminine poles within interpersonal relationships, most easily seen in heterosexual romantic relationships. Similarly, these gendered poles exist in our own selves — we each hold elements of the masculine and the feminine in our own selves. And, these poles exist in society at large.

Naming the human condition in its similarities and differences, I believed, would help foster integration of these differences into deeper connections.

Religious texts failed me in this desire.

At least, religious texts as we traditionally understand them failed me.

I discovered that fairy tales offered me a way forward. Perhaps because fairy tales have been a way for women to pass on their wisdom. And during times when women were excluded from positions of authority and theological conversations, they were probably the ones thinking about integrating their masculine and feminine natures.

In fairy tales, the masculine and feminine are often represented by prince/king and princess/queen. They may be in conflict throughout a story, but they almost always find a way to re/unite and love one another at the end (which explains all those wedding endings).

Perhaps our cultural love for fairy tales and their (re-)(re-)re-tellings is because we experience that same truth inside our own selves: our masculine and feminine are in conflict, but we hope for them to love each other.

Fairy tales, then, were able to satisfy my longing for a connective theology of sin. Fairy tales cultivate an understanding of sin as something more than a barrier, but as an essential part of the journey toward grace. Fairy tales show that sin is part of a process toward reconciliation — reconciliation of the differences within our own selves and differences between ourselves and others.

In upcoming posts, I’ll be sharing more of my work and reflections on this process of discovering the ways that sin is good news. I hope you’ll join me. Make sure you don’t miss one by signing up — I’ll deliver once-a-week updates with what’s happening on the blog, right to your inbox.

[1] Paraphrased from Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, ed. Carol P. Christ, (New York, NY; HarperCollins, 1979), 35.

[2] Feminine and masculine are words pertaining to gender, which refers to culturally identified traits and programming; male and female are words that relate to physical, biological sex. An individual’s primary gender may or may not correspond with their embodied sex. Each individual carries masculine and feminine gendered poles within his or her self, regardless of physical sex. For more, see Lois Tyson, “Feminist Criticism,” in Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide, 83-131, 2^nd ed. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006).

[3] In Genesis 1:27-29 (NRSV) we read that God creates humankind in God’s image. While there’s much debate over what exactly “the image of God” is, the text seems to imply that it has something to do with the fact that “male and female God created them.” We best reflect God through being two distinct beings that create one humanity; our human plural corresponds to the divine singular. Thus, I believe the responsible development of theologies must include diversity that is united into a singular humanity.

Share in the comments:

What have you believed is the worst sin? How has that belief shaped your life choices?

Has naming something as sin ever felt liberating? Tell us about it.

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”?

February 1, 2016March 24, 2016

A Prayer for Women’s Equality

Below is a prayer for women’s equality, written in the Celtic style. Celtic prayers heavily utilize repetition and rhyme, and in both content and form these prayers emphasize the Trinity.

I wrote it at a time when I was attempting to understand my pastoral giftings and my womanhood. Too often, I have felt that USAmerican culture values a woman’s role as mother more highly than any other contribution she may make to society. Having come from a church with all male pastors and being a Divinity program, at the time, in which all the other students were men, I had very little imagination for being both female and pastoral. Those themes are heavy in this prayer; I hope it serves you well in whatever your struggles are today.

A Prayer for Women’s Equality

“By a woman and a tree the world first perished.”

I wish, O Son of the living God,
eternal, ancient King,
for reconciliation between the sexes,
that I might answer your calling.

I pray, O Son of the living God,
eternal, ancient King,
for –

I wish –
that –

Mother, Child,
Goose of the Wild,
Keep me from despair,
Hear my prayer.

I pray, O Child of the living God,
eternal, ancient Queen,
for compassion in men’s hearts
that they could view women as clean.

I strive, O Child of the living God,
eternal, ancient Queen,
for a new paradigm, not princess or bitch,
that views women as strong and not mean.

I hope, O Child of the living God,
eternal, ancient Queen,
for society to know women have worth
after their children are weaned,
or at least after the age of eighteen.

I long, O Child of the living God,
eternal, ancient Queen,
for rest within the body that is me,
that I may be serene.

Questions for You

What are your hopes and prayers for women in 2016? What are your concerns?

October 13, 2015January 12, 2016

Integrative Project Presentation

To Play with a Child Named Sorrow - post on Literate Theology / Kate Rae Davis

This Spring, I handed in my final master’s work, called an Integrative Project, titled “To Play with a Child Named Sorrow: Engaging Sin, Grief, and the Self-in-Relation through Myth and Fairy Tale.” I spent 15 months to write and then whittle down to 70 pages, and then whittled further until I had a 10minute presentation. The abstract is below; click through here to see the presentation.

Western theology’s understanding of sin on pride has focused on pride, which has furthered the oppression of women. In the last 50 years, feminist theology has made great strides in explaining how pride (“masculine sin” developed by male theologians) oppresses and has named “feminine sin” (which I term echoism) as diffuseness, a lack of a sense of self, a defining of one’s self by relationship. However, theology has failed to discuss the ways in which these sins interact with one another and how we interpersonally move from sin to grace. In “The Myth of Echo & Narcissus,” we see the ways in which pride harmfully emphasizes the self and how echoism harmfully emphasizes relationship. In “The Tale of the Handless Maiden,” we come to see the transforming process of grief, which frees us to love. This is not simply a balance between pride and echoism; this process is a transformation of human character that comes through an active process of receiving God in the midst of grief. The burden is not on humanity to find a way to manage or balance our sins. Rather, as the tale shows us, characterological change frees us from the constraints of sin (with emphasis on either self or relation) and frees us to love as selves-in-relation.

See the 10-minute presentation here: https://vimeo.com/138362284

"Echo and Narcissus" by John William Waterhouse — “Echo and Narcissus” by John William Waterhouse

June 2, 2015March 7, 2016

Mad Max Christ

This post is part of a series on the theology of Mad Max: Fury Road. Find the rest of the series here.

In the opening scenes of Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), we see Max (Tom Hardy) captured by War Boys of the Citadel. A prisoner of this empire, his body is under their control. The empire enlists him into service, finding use in him as an unwilling blood donor. An IV runs directly from his vein into the arm of Nux (Nicholas Hoult), one of the many ailing War Boys. When the call comes for the boys to fight, Nux orders that his “blood bag,” Max, be chained to him so that he can drive into the battle.

And so it is that we find Max, our title hero, chained to the front of a speeding car as though he were a wooden figurehead on the prow of a Roman ship.

For most military ornamentation, the purpose is to demonstrate the wealth and power of the empire. An empire that has resources to put into unnecessary embellishment and decoration is certainly an empire with abundance, with surplus — an empire that rules enough land and manpower to produce such extravagance.

But here, in a land with few natural resources (Immortan Joe controls the people through controlling the water supply), there is no gold to be mined nor trees to be cut down for a figurehead. But what they do have is this prisoner; the Citadel shows its power through controlling Max’s body. It is impractical to do so; he’d be a much safer resource tucked behind the driver’s seat. But he’s up front, sand in his eyes, his weight a nuisance to the movement of the vehicle, so that this empire can show their might.

The empire controls the level of danger into which his body is placed. The empire controls his level of discomfort. The empire controls the pace at which his life-blood is drained from him.

In this sense, Max the Figurehead may be one of the best images our contemporary culture has of Jesus the Crucified One.

Jesus, like Max, was a prisoner of the empire. His body was used to demonstrate the empire’s control. The Roman empire used crosses the way naval ships and Nux use figureheads, as a symbol to say: We are strong enough to not only kill, but to control. We are strong enough to kill slowly, strong enough to control the blood’s slow draining.

As a culture, we have lost our disgust in response to the cross. The cross, today, is an decoration on the wall of our home, an ornamental tattoo on our shoulder, a bejeweled trinket that hangs on our necklace. We talk about finding comfort in the cross. We don’t feel any of the guttural responses the cross evoked in first century peoples living in fear of the empire. We don’t feel, in our guts, the repulsion, the deprivation, the dehumanizing cruelty that must occur in order to hang a body on a plank in the desert.

Max, the Mad One, the Holy One is here to show us: there is no comfort in the cross. This image of a man cruelly and unnecessarily hanging from the front of a speeding car, this man whose lifeblood is dripping from him, helps shape our understanding of what we are no longer able to see in the cross. This image in culture helps inform the image in religion. This image helps us to re-find–in our guts, in our disgust–the scandal of the crucifixion.

For just imagine, for a moment, that that man being used as a hood ornament is the Child of God, the Word made flesh, the hope and salvation of the world, the promised Holy One.

This post is part of a series on the theology of Mad Max: Fury Road. Find the rest of the series here.

May 2, 2015January 9, 2016

Reach: Reading Eve’s Story

I was recently invited by OneLife Community Church to preach in their series on women in the bible, and chose to preach on the first woman, Eve. The sermon was a product of years of struggling and engagement with the story of “The Fall,” and I feel like this sermon gave me an opportunity to articulate the story in a way that generates new life for me — and I hope it does for you, too.

A video of the sermon can be found here.

If you have any questions or concerns, the comments section is open.