Author: KPB Stevens

The Jordan is Not Too Far Away

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

I have just had three poems published in As Surely As the Sun Literary Journal. You can read them by following this link. I’m going to publish commentaries on each of them in the next three weeks, starting today.

Sometimes I simply want to be inside of a story as if I were inside of a painting. The colors, the scene, the shape of clouds on a far horizon, the figures in the foreground, they all invite me in. But my participation is enhanced by noting the artist’s skill, the way that one color speaks to another. The way that an array of tones and tints leads the eye around the canvas, and gives it balance. When I sit to practice *lectio divina* with a scripture story, my prayer is enhanced by whatever small knowledge I’ve gained of the story’s artistry.

The story of the resurrection of Lazarus is beautiful, as much for its craft as its meaning. Jesus and the disciples are on the other side of the Jordan, where they are safe from Herod, who is seeking Jesus to take his life. The Jordan, of course, is the river that the Israelites crossed into the Promised Land. Moses died within sight of it but never crossed it himself. John the Baptist called the crowds from Jerusalem to come to the river and cross it again, and have that crossing be their baptism, the entry into a promised land of new life. He baptized Jesus there, and Jesus came up out of the waters, like a new creation. Given all of this, the disciples’ retreat to the safety of the other side of the Jordan feels like a surrender, as if they are giving up on the promise and the possibilities of living in a new way.

Mary and Martha don’t know where Jesus has gone, but the Jordan River is still part of their story. After all, water circulates. It evaporates. It comes down as rain. It flows. The waters of the Jordan are in the air around us, particulate and unnoticed, there to be breathed in, or to condense so that we can drink them. Lazarus lays dying, and his sweat contains some atom of the Jordan, the most minute promise and possibility. The allegory of rebirth.

Water. It flows everywhere in this poem. Sweat and tears are returned to the air. The river marks a boundary and a passage. Water flows from mothers at birth. It seeps slowly from the body after death. It washes away the dust of the grave. It is the blue of the painting. It is in the painted sky, in the embroidered flowers on the sister’s robes, in the flow of the river, in Jesus’s robes as he wades across. In the droplets that linger as he steps along the road, making his way into the hills. Its movement is its explanation, its need, and purpose. The poem serves nothing less than water.

The Birth of Longing

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My poem, “The Birth of Longing,” has just been published in Braided Way, a wonderful online journal. You can link to the poem here. I wrote a very short essay on it years ago, which I offer below.

Illumination of “The Birth of Longing”

When I was seventeen, I found myself in the John Muir Woods outside of San Francisco. I have tried, for many years, to write about what I encountered there. It will never find adequate expression in words, but this poem is the closest that I have come. Yet I wrote it more than twenty years afterwards, when time had worked its distorting force on the memory, and an accretion of spiritual and religious meaning had grown around it. This is the problem with youthful mystical experience — the systems of meaning that we use to make sense of such experiences haven’t been encountered or absorbed yet, or at least they hadn’t been for me. I was left with an experience of the divine that existed in a vacuum, and once I started filling that vacuum with theology and Christian practice the experience itself seemed to change. It had to rattle against everything I was learning. At first it was a word shouted into the void. Now there was a landscape of thought in that void, and the word echoed against that landscape, and became inseparable from that echo.

This poem is full of a sense of loss. The loss of the original freshness and inarticulate nature of the experience itself, and then the loss that comes from the limitations of experience, and the fact that, try as I might, I have never been able to experience the power of that day in the John Muir Woods within the context of my Christian faith. I don’t blame my faith for this. It has led me to other mystical experiences, different in kind and intensity from that day in the woods, but full of grace and power, nonetheless. And I no longer want to experience a repetition of that day, although that was something I wanted very badly for many years. As I age, the restlessness begins to fade, or becomes less of a constant, so that even this poem, the truest expression of an ineffable moment that I can manage, grows less truthful in its closing lines. And that is the problem with memory, and with poetry. It tames experience. Yet without it, the experience would be lost, a fading echo disappearing into the trees.

Trees, Figs, Gardens, and Cities

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“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.

Aggy, the Enslaved Cook, Reads Peter’s First Letter

~ KPB Stevens ~ 1 Comment

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.