“Happy are they who wash their robes so as to have free access to the tree of life.” – The Revelation to St. John
Eve ate with tiny teeth, the seeds like gravel in her mouth, and sweet. You are naked said the syrup when sliding down her throat. Take my leaves, said the tree, and learn to sew. This was the first tree, that grew the fig of knowledge, the tree with wide leaves, cursed for lacking winter foliage.
Adam, wandering, with fig leaves chafing his nether regions, wished that they could begin again. When he watched one son kill another he thought, surely this deserves to be called the first sin. He knew, then, how hard it is to be a father, and wished that when Eve had acquired all reason, she had told him not to bother.
All this long life, learning how to atone, generations on this earth with an uneasy sense of home. Cloth from flax, cloth from cotton, cloth from wool, cloth from oil found outside the garden where we wander over ancient bones.
There is a fig tree in the city that the garden’s tree loves dearly. He sheds his dust of pollen onto a wasp’s vibrating wings, clothing it with purpose beyond its painful stings. A wasp was buried in the fruit that Eve first gave to Adam, it laid its eggs among the seeds and sweet flesh made a home for them. When Adam ate he ate this mother’s grave. As this was the first taste, can anything be saved? The trees stand fat and fruiting in the garden and the city. They see me standing in the distance, wondering what I know. We see you loitering there, they say. Approach, but first, you must wash your clothes.
Illumination
It is honest to meet God in a state of bewilderment. And if the divine is reflected in creation, bewilderment is also an honest response to the world. Imagine this. Someone, once, realized that the fibers within flax plants could be spun together and then used for weaving. Later, someone discovered that you could soften the husk of the flax plant in order to access those fibers sooner. Someone once looked at a sheep and said, “It looks dry and warm despite the rain. How can it be enticed to share its warmth and dryness?” In the very recent past, someone learned to make cloth from oil. Human imagination encountered creation and spun fabric from bewilderment. A coat is a concrete, realized thing. But the innovation that shifted and sorted and manipulated materials across countless generations is the result of accident, surprise, desire, conversation, coincidence. A string carries a story that we’ll never know. Put on the coat. Put on bewilderment.
Bewilderment is very close to wonder. But it carries within it a knowledge of being lost, led into the wilderness, an environment that is unknown and unreadable, where it is very easy to lose your way. I once got lost in the woods. I encountered a large turtle lumbering along. I followed it, marveling at the pattern of its shell. When I looked up, nothing was familiar. The path had disappeared. If you follow wonder for long enough, you will find bewilderment.
When Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they were sent into the wild. Knowledge became bewilderment that quickly. What kind of tree was it? Rabbi Yosei provided a midrash. It must be a fig tree, he said, because all the other trees in the garden rejected Adam and Eve for having deceived their creator. Only the fig tree clothed them, to atone for being responsible for their plight. It is more complicated to bite into a fig than it is to bite into an apple. Many different textures arrive in the mouth, and you have to account for the seeds. Imagine that bite. So sweet and syrupy and full of things, including the wasp. Bewildering.
Its leaves were the first cloth. As Adam and Eve wore fig leaves and the leaves chafed them, did they resent the fig tree? Nudity is so uncomplicated, once you get past the social hindrances. Somewhere along the line, Adam and Eve discovered fashion. Now they not only needed to be warm, they needed to look good. The shame they first encountered when they discovered all reason became part of their daily reality. Glances on the street, worrying about which set of clothes would go with which dinner reservation. Knowing that this person has status because of their hat, and this person doesn’t, because of their socks. Bewildering.
Why does John of Patmos insist on a laundry day prior to encountering the Tree of Life? He urges those who read his visionary account to wash themselves in the blood of the lamb. Christ’s blood. Take on misery, he says, take on sorrow. Take on the sins of others. Know their loves, their hatreds, their tastes. Hear unkind words echoing in your ears, interspersed by shouts of joy. Let the weight of the world settle on your shoulders like the weight of a sodden coat. Life is better than knowledge, but there’s so much of it. Yet the Tree of Life beckons us home. An end to wandering in the woods. Only we have to bring the bewilderment home with us.
Stones Into Bread, KPB Stevens, Mixed Media on Paper, 2026
I’ve started working large, and taking days to make a painting. This is the first in a projected series of seven paintings that I hope to show at St. Stephen’s in Lent, 2027.
I watched my master beat my daughter because she folded the napkins wrong. Somehow he didn’t mind that they were spattered with her blood and had to be washed again.
Perfection was his excuse for looking at her in a certain way, and I knew he hid his waiting in the violence, that it was a rehearsal for a rape. When I heard your letter read, I raged. I cannot stay silent.
Tell me, Peter, did you walk through the sheep gate or climb into the fold some other way on that unthinking day when you chose to dictate that letter to us slaves, telling us to be obedient, to behave?
As if our suffering is just a way of being polite, as if a polite Christ died on Calvary Hill, as if we are to wait and wait in heaven’s light and never mind that we are killed.
Peter, you always disappointed Him. Look at me. I am the figure making fire on the shore. I am the one who will tell you to undo your sins by feeding us and leading us to shelter.
Are you so ignorant of terrors? Go away, Peter. I seek a better shepherd, one who isn’t blithe and dismissive in his errors, one who has already found his cross and learned.
Illumination
I have spent the week feeling very angry with St. Peter, or at least angry at the author of 1 Peter, whom many scholars think was a presbyter in Rome and not the apostle himself. I would like to believe this, as the author of 1 Peter doesn’t chime well with the apostle I have grown to know and love. The author of the letter says, plainly, in Chapter 2, verse 18, that slaves should “accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh.” This injunction was one of the Biblical statements that were used to justify American slavery, and it sounds like something that would come out of the mouth of a slave-catcher rather than an apostle of Christ.
This verse rightfully embarrassed the biblical scholars and denominational representatives who created the Revised Common Lectionary, as they left it out of the reading from 1 Peter that falls on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year A. But this omission distorts everything that follows. The lectionary begins with verse 19, “For it is a credit to you if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly.” This makes it sound as if the suffering in question is the kind that anyone could experience – part of the expected grief of being a human being who lives within any system of jurisprudence, where petty injustices often prosper. But it’s not. The author is clearly talking about a slave’s suffering, and his blithe acceptance of the suffering created within horrific systems of injustice does nothing to try to counter those systems. Instead, he tries to valorize that suffering by comparing it to the cross. Jesus willingly suffered at the hands of oppressors, he says, so you should, too. No wonder it became a verse that was used in support of the institution of American slavery. You can hear the justification, someone saying “by enslaving people, we’re allowing them to be Christ-like.”
Preachers who want to reduce the impact of these horrendous verses will often point to the difference between racialized chattel slavery in America and slavery in the Roman Empire. I’ve heard the arguments many times. Slaves in the Roman Empire could own property, sometimes even other slaves! Slaves were often educated! Some people sold themselves into slavery! Some slaves could be expected to be set free before they turned thirty! Slaves were of higher social status than other poor people! The subtext to all of these claims is that the author of 1 Peter should somehow be let off the hook for telling people to remain meek and mild when they are beaten and raped. And, while the differences in ancient slavery and antebellum slavery that scholars point to really existed, the fact is that many Roman slaves were worked to death in mines and quarries, and that slave revolts were very common. Hard to imagine a contented, educated, well-fed, and well-treated slave joining a slave revolt. The fact that slaves rose up again and again in the Roman Empire certainly implies that few of them enjoyed a very cushy life. If you were a free person living in the Roman Empire, you could find gainful employment as a “slave-flogger.” That fact alone should tell you everything you need to know.
The desire of preachers and scholars to somehow defend 1 Peter 2:18 is indicative of a sad misunderstanding of the very nature of scripture itself. For those who believe that scripture is a univocal, God-dictated text, the author of 1 Peter is speaking a thorny but necessary truth. If everything in the Bible speaks to some mysterious desire of God, then the horrors must be explained away as belonging to some plan that we are simply too dim-witted to understand. Such a mindset looks at the Bible’s obvious contradictions and sets to work trying to prove that they somehow don’t exist. But if you accept that the Bible is a compendium of human beings’ struggles to understand the meaning of their lives, and the meaning of God’s presence within the world, then you can begin to see the arguments and contradictions within scripture for what they are. Arguments and contradictions. Paul does not agree with James. Proverbs does not agree with Ecclesiastes. These disagreements are part of the point. The councils of rabbis and church leaders who created the scriptural canon were well aware that the texts they were considering for inclusion often wanted to argue with each other. They included them anyway. As if they thought that difference of opinion, argument, and contradiction were the point. As if they thought that we come close to truth by wrestling with its many manifestations, and by wrestling with the untruths, as Jacob wrestled with the angel.
So I feel no need to defend the author of 1 Peter. I think he’s wrong. About slavery, obviously, but also about Christ’s death on the cross. To me, Christ’s acceptance of crucifixion is a liberative act – it’s meant to liberate all of us. Not to inspire us to accept oppression as a form of imitation. As Allen Dwight Callahan points out in The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible, 1 Peter 2:18 is a poison verse. But the genius of the Bible is that it holds the antidote to such poison as well. Its founding narrative is the story of a group of disobedient slaves begging God to help them to escape oppression, and God answering their pleas. Slaves in the American South understood this with a clarity that seems to escape apologist Biblical scholars and preachers. Callahan writes:
African Americans have held fast to the Bible only by holding fast to its contradictions. Indeed, the contradictions suited their condition, for African Americans themselves incarnated America’s greatest contradiction. They were slaves in the land of the free. As slaves, they were at the same time persons and property. As people of African descent, they were heirs to a noble ancient history and an ignoble modern legacy. On the margins of American society, they remained at the center of its most bitter conflicts. Long after the fall of the slave regime, slavery’s children bear the indelible marks of these contradictions.
Again and again, antebellum slaves invoked one passage of scripture to counter another passage of scripture, “calling on Jesus to witness against the Bible itself.” Black preachers argued with the apostles and the epistle writers. This wasn’t dismissive, but its own form of respect. It assumed that St. Paul, and the author of 1 Peter, and many others, were guilty, mostly, of a lack of vision and imagination, and that they could be converted into a broader understanding. Lay preacher Maria Stewart said, and said rightly, that “did St. Paul but know of our wrongs and deprivations, I presume he would make no objections to our pleading in public for our rights.”
Which brings me, at long last, to my poem. Aggy was a real woman, a mild-mannered cook who, when she saw her master beat her daughter for a minor infraction, burst out into a psalm-like denunciation, asking God to take her side against her white oppressors. In my poem, I imagine her hearing 1 Peter 2:18 and responding to it. She, like everyone at the time, assumed that the letter was penned by St. Peter himself. She denounces him for his lack of vision and compassion. She implies that this lack of vision stems from the fact that he hasn’t been crucified yet. His crucifixion will come, and then, hopefully, he will understand her suffering. And she compares herself to the risen Christ, who sat on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and cooked fish for the apostles, and allowed Peter to undo his three denials by thrice promising to feed Christ’s sheep.
There is something broken in us, something that blithely diminishes the pain of others. We deny the statistics, distrust the horror stories, assume that because our lives are relatively painless and easy, painless and easy is the common mode of most of life. It’s not. Many people have a more intimate understanding of the cross than we do. They understand it well enough that they know that the goal is to get off it, not stay on it. They understand that, just as resurrection broke the stone that sealed the tomb, crucifixion is meant to break the cross, showing us that God desires an end to suffering, not for it to continue as a form of imitation, or even blessing.
It was raining on the road to Emmaus, and not very glorious, and one of them kept humming a rain song that was popular in the seventies, and thought to himself, “How strange it is, in the midst of wonder and misery, that I remember a dusty car radio, and this song playing as a friend’s mom drove us to a soccer game. Did the Rabbi ever speak of this, how we can be distracted by inconsequentialities? Only now I suppose we should call him a prophet. Not a parser of the personal mind but a loud proclaimer concerned with nation states and communal fervor. Providing midrash for the moment, one might say, not wondering why certain songs get stuck in your head, why there’s a soundtrack to a rainy day, or why a rote prayer over bread gives such comfort with its familiarity. If it weren’t raining we might stop to eat, enjoy a nibble beside the road. I’m hungry now, although last night if someone had offered food I would have turned away. Funny how the mere rumor of His rising from the tomb makes me ravenous. There’s an inn up ahead where we can be dry from the rain and break our fast and listen to water drum along the eaves and I can tell this stranger we’ve met about that song from the seventies, and maybe even hum a line or two for him. Why do I think that he already knows it, and might have caused its resurrection?”
Illumination
I find this to be a delightful thought. Christ plays in our memories, is responsible for the little resurrection of some occurrence or image or song that floats back into our consciousness, for no reason that we can discern. Resurrection is certainly a big event, but if it was only a big event it wouldn’t mean much in the day-to-day. Most of our lives are spent in simple acts – making breakfast, commuting, staring at computer screens, humming some half-remembered song. It’s true that we’re shaped by outsized moments, but most of our shaping comes from very small things. Twiddly thoughts, internal monologues, recalling some story we’ve read or watched on TV. It’s like the difference between an earthquake cracking rock and a stream slowly eroding a stone.
I also always want to bring the Gospel story into the present moment, somehow, or bring the present moment to the Gospel. As if time doesn’t really matter, or has no settled progression. After all, the events of the resurrection reverberate eternally. And God, being eternal, exists outside of time. Those moments when we touch the divine are timeless, and we might sit with God and look in at time, and see all events happening at once, across millennia and generations.
Historicity can become a form of limitation, and its claims to exist within a reasonable universe are disproven by the simple act of borrowing some idea of the past and bringing it into the present, or placing some image or song from the 1970s into a disciple’s mind. We know little of real history, since we didn’t live through the events, and even our personal histories get forgotten and reinterpreted. Every historian brings a set of assumptions to their work, and distort our ideas of the past, often without acknowledging it. A song is much more innocuous than an ideology. I’d rather have it playing with the past than I would a set of theories, based in our current prejudices. If only scholars could acknowledge that their scholarship is a kind of delightful game. To me, that would increase its value, not make it valueless. A game, a song, something we sing back and forth across time, walking along in our own little worlds of meaning, feeling our little, ordinary resurrections.
Last Sunday, we finished our five-part series on Lament by considering praise. It is rather beautiful that laments, which are so honest and raw about negative emotions, also have plenty of room for thanksgiving and expressions of joy. The ancient Israelites seemed to know that emotive prayer couldn’t be completely honest if it only dwelled on the hard things. Human beings are deeply complex, and moments of distress are often also moments of discovery and uplift. So we end our laments with praise not out of any insistence on false optimism, but from a sense that we can’t be complete people without acknowledging the light as well as the darkness.
Opening Prompt
Here’s the opening prompt that I offered to our study group:
Name something or someone that you love, yet struggle to find words to describe the love you have for them.
People talked about all sorts of things, from the natural world to familial relationships. Since the discussion that followed touched frequently on ineffability, it was good to start by acknowledging that even the things we’re most familiar with escape our powers of description from time to time.
A Teaching About Praise
The Bible describes different understandings of reality and selfhood than those held by most people in the post-industrial Western world. For the ancient Israelites, there was no understanding of self outside of encounters and covenant with God, who is understood to “author” reality. Scripture puts God’s justice at the center of reality and expects God to act in history and to be present in our current struggles. But encounters with God go far beyond any of our imaginings.
Martin Buber famously described our relationship with this present, active God as an “I/Thou” relationship. I/Thou relationships are intimate and lead to transformation, as encounters with a “Thou,” be it a tree, a building, the Godhead, or anything else, are totalizing. Buber writes that
“Nothing conceptual intervenes between I and Thou, no prior knowledge and no imagination: and memory itself is changed as it plunges from particularity into wholeness. No purpose intervenes between I and Thou, no greed and no anticipation, and longing itself is changed as it plunges from the dream into appearance. Only where all means have disintegrated encounters occur.”
When our experience of each other or the things of this world is one of utility, we are not in I/Thou relationships, but are involved in I/It forms of exploitation, as if the stuff of the universe exists only to serve our purposes.
Songs of praise are expressions of I/Thou encounters. They speak of relationship and transformation. Walter Brueggemann writes that “in this practice of praise the human person lives best and well and most freely when all of the self and all of the claims of the self are given over in full, unreserved surrender to God.” According to Bruggememann (all the following quotes are his), praise has these qualities:
It is unrestrained address to God in extremes of need and joy.
It is not transactional – not giving thanks for gifts received or services rendered, but “a lyrical expression of amazement, astonishment, and gratitude towards the Holy One who lies beyond everything the human persons can generate.”
It contains awed recognition of the wonders of creation, of God’s ongoing “birthing” of the cosmos, and sees creation as a form of generous extravagance that cannot be hoarded or even possessed by human beings. It asserts that there is a “limitless generosity at the root of reality.”
Psalm 63:1-8
We can see this sense of praise at work in Psalm 63, called, in the tradition Deus, Deus Meus which means “God, my God.” Here’s the text of the psalm:
The psalm describes an experience of God, but it doesn’t do so directly. It speaks of the effects of the encounter, the sense of satiation and contentment. It seems exaggerated with its talk of fainting flesh and thirsting souls. It doesn’t name the gifts that God has bestowed, as it isn’t at all transactional – there is no sense of God having made good on a promise or responded to a request for anything but divine presence. To write a hymn of praise like this requires that we take seriously everything else that we’ve learned about laments, particularly last week’s learning about petitionary prayer.
Writing A Prayer of Praise
First, read through what you’ve already written, and ground yourself in the feelings and images. Then…
Reflect on an encounter with God. (You don’t have to describe the specifics of the encounter. It is enough to name the encounter, as in Psalm 63: “I have gazed upon you in your holy place.”)
Try to find words for the aftermath of the encounter, how it felt in your body and in your mind, how you continue to reflect on it. (Example: “My soul is content, as with marrow and fatness…I remember you upon my bed and meditate on you in the night watches.”)
Name “witnesses” to the encounter, other parts of your life and of creation where you experience “Thou-ness”. (Example: “Let the earth glorify the Lord, sing praise and give honor for ever. Glorify the Lord, O mountains & hills, & all that grows upon the earth, sing praise and give honor for ever. Glorify the Lord, O springs of water, seas, and streams, O whales and all that move in the waters.” -The Book of Daniel.)
Here’s what I wrote in response to these prompts, continuing my meditation on the war in Iran and my own feeling of futility as I try to figure out if there’s anything at all that I can do about it:
I have seen a child grin with joy in the midst of devastation, and have seen you in a child’s face as she plays in the rubble. I close my eyes and see that joy, I grow unreasonable with joy, I smile secretly, and only you know what I am feeling, what I am hearing. Every child in every place, every voice raised in laughter, every babble of imagination, every game, and dance, every moment spent singing in the grass, insists, with you, that joy, like the world, remains.
Some final thoughts, before offering more examples
I have been thinking a lot about how I might use laments as part of my regular prayer practices in the future. In particular, I’m wondering if they might be a way to keep my petty resentments from spilling over. If a person or situation has upset me, can I sit down and write a lament before I react? Will it help clarify my own sense of disappointment, or reveal my pettiness or peevishness? If laments are meant to help us maintain a right relationship with God, can they help with human relationships as well?
Perhaps. I might find that it’s best to reserve lament writing for those times when my soul wants to howl with despair, not over some difficult relationship, but over the state of the world. For those moments when I want to curl up in bed and cry, or deaden myself with drink and distraction.
I am a neophyte when it comes to lament, but also enticed by it, and I will look for ways to deepen my practice.
Full text of sample laments
Here, in full, are the two laments I wrote as I prepared to teach. I hope you find them helpful, and that, if you write your own laments, you might share them with me.
Lamentation, The Masked Men
Doxed Divinity, naked-faced agitator caught in a camera’s eye, strip away the bully’s costume, pull the mask down from his face, send him reeling back in nakedness, bring him to his knees.
We voted for our destruction, gave away our liberties because of the price of eggs. Now doors crack inwards, windows shatter, the frigid day stalks in, the masked face of winter squints through beady eyes. Children weep as gloved hands grasp and hold their heads. There is no tenderness. Schools empty, children starve, and pompous, apostate senators clasp their hands upon their bellies and regard our destruction as Your best wish. Why don’t you haunt their nights and make them weep, and make the cold stretch across their naked skin? Why don’t you batter and berate them?
You, who, when the flood had ended, sent a beam of sunlight onto the post of a broken fence, after everyone had fled, and the long, sallow girl who spoke in gangly sentences played a song of hopefulness. The stuffing had come out of the houses and lay, gray on dirty streets, and the ship that broke the levy balanced on the neighborhood’s jagged edge. But still, the light on the post, and the song, and we agreed with each other that even destruction welcomes the sun.
Warm the winter skies, shine within the icicle’s shattering, be a shard of collapse, cold’s downfall. The people sit in cages and all who love have worry in their eyes. We cannot stop hearing children cry. We must learn to live without our masks. We must learn to see you face to face, and each other, face to face, us. Let children wave blessings in the air when the summer world wakes the dead, let them invite us into their care. Grow like grass through cracked belief. Be the animal that we thought was extinct, who returns to wander ruined streets.
I have seen your breath as snowdrops growing from a patch of melting snow, the cold grown granular and cracking, the flowers heavy, clumped, and sprawling. I wake and know that the world is ready, again, for us to walk in it, that children make toys out of ruins, that my own body can know their joy. Let you be glorified with photographs, pictures of released captives, and triumphant whistling in the streets, all warnings turned to victories, winter turned to rain with sunlight following, nature, and us, conspiring in the end of ice and cruelty’s defeat.
Lamentation, Pharoah’s Silos
Grain of spirit milled for bread, fill the children who hide inside, sharpen their minds, give freedom to their play, remind them, through your buried taste, that they will emerge into daylight, that the world is always being remade.
This is the season of starvation, the old season that our ancestors feared, lean with empty cupboards, sacks emptied of grain. Joseph built great silos and put them in Pharaoh’s hand. Pharaoh still controls them, and there’s famine in the land. The grocery stores are open, the shelves are laden and the coolers softly glow. But a glacier spans the city, and the children live beyond it, starving on ice flows. Why aren’t you sunlight, hot and fierce? Why don’t you drown the pharaohs and lead us into wilderness?
Once, in the desert, we built a house. The sun made a cooking stone of the concrete slab, and we built quickly, making shade, and the family that would live there lifted sheetrock with us, then retreated, in the heat, to their shack of cardboard walls. Power lines were slack in a street of dust, and when our saws stopped working children lifted cables, looking for the break, ignoring the electricity that would kill them at a touch. Sweat, a stinging in the eyes, and the scratch of insulation to keep the cold of the desert night outside. And then, with dirty hands, we ate together in the dust, bean burritos, and the taste of the hands that made them, and of contentment, and our acceptance of Your love.
Allow us, now, to taste contentment, that lovely taste of tiredness, and work well done, and hard. Create banquets for those who hide and starve. The mind grows sluggish and words are hard to find, and anger, like dust, grows in the corners of the rooms. Let Your leaven fill the air, let us taste it on our tongues. Everyone will eat, everywhere, when You come, when You arrive as a guest at the starving house, the silos broken behind You, the grain spilling from your tomb.
I have seen you, thick as sunlight, in the yellow room where we sit and eat beneath the poster of the market – stacked tomatoes, antique trucks, an artist’s vision of fulness after the plains had turned to dust. I have caught a glimpse of you, as I make our bread, the deep contentment of a kitchen, the delight as dough rises, as the air summons its leaven to eat and rise, invisible, in the body of the bread. Give glory, hidden nourishment – yeast within the air, mitochondria in our cells, nitrogen in dangling beans, the germ safe for eating within the stalk of grain’s covered head – sing, O mysteries of human feasting, limestone used to shuck the casing of dried and hoarded corn, smoke putting bees to sleep so we may taste the honey in the hive, potatoes dug from earth, their green tops swaying, rooted with our life. We become storehouses, we open up our doors, the grain of ingenuity pours out into the square. We feast and dance together, having shared our secret food. Give glory for all nourishment, and all preservation of the good.
KPB Stevens 