This is my son John.
In summer, he will wear a buffalo robe,
or bury himself in an anorak or a ski-jacket,
snow pants and a hat with ear flaps.
In winter he’ll walk naked.
His skin will be blue.
When he’s out in the wilderness
he might sit on a pole,
or roll himself up like a hedgehog
and live in a tree.
He might insist on being walled up
in a church or a tomb.
People will come from all around
to hear his raw visions of winnowing forks.
He’ll appease our lust for divisions.
In all ways he’ll be wrong
when he describes his divine cousin.
He’ll wear the face paint of a clown.
No one will know him without feeling eerie,
as if chaos is a bee in his mouth,
as if God is a flood as well as a season,
an earthquake and the waxing of the moon.
My child, O my child,
you will live such foolish truth.
Cry out the dangers that shadow our safety,
become the poet of the shrouded dooms
that hide within our complacency.
God chose you to say this to the world —
we will always need strangers
to judge us and love us.
We will always need gooseflesh,
the pinprick of the uncanny,
the locust mystery, the bizarre, the unearthly.
We will always need some raw character
to wave at us from a river. We will always grieve
when our children become strangers.
Illumination
About a decade ago Steven Charleston, the Bishop of Alaska, wrote a remarkable book. Charleston is a member of the Choctaw Nation, and his book, The Four Vision Quests of Jesus, reflects on the life of Christ in terms of what he calls the Native Covenant. He understands Native culture as a text that Jesus speaks into, in the same way that Jesus’s life and teachings spoke into and out of the text of the Hebrew Scriptures. This is a wonderful and liberating claim. For a long time I’ve insisted, along with many others, that a Christian must read and draw lessons from the “book of the world” as well as from scripture. Charleston takes this claim further. Culture, he says, is always a text that Jesus interacts with, and a culture’s understanding of Jesus illuminates the Gospels as powerfully as the epistles, the psalms, the prophets, wisdom literature, apocalyptic books, and the Torah do.
Part of the Native Covenant that Charleston brings to his reading of the Gospels is an understanding of necessary strangeness. Whether they admit or not, every culture has a deep need for strangeness. In Christian history, many figures have arisen who have intentionally estranged themselves from the world around them. In the 5th century, a man named Simeon lived on a pole near the Syrian city of Aleppo and was given the nickname of Stylites. In the 12th century the Belgian mystic Christina the Astonishing lived in trees and rolled herself up like a hedgehog to sleep. In the 13th century the Italian mystic Angela of Foligno would scream in church and block doorways as she stood frozen in place, weeping over the sacred mysteries. There are many, many other examples, including St. Francis, who was treated as a stranger both by his society and by the order he founded.
Bishop Charleston points out the idea of necessary strangeness was more easily accepted and venerated in Native tradition than in European Christendom. He writes about two types of necessary strangers, the koshares who lived among the peoples of the southwest and the heyokas of the Plains peoples. Both were clowns, people who played important cultural roles and were welcomed because of their differences. Koshares would interrupt dance ceremonies with provocative, scatological, and even lewd behavior. Their actions would “break the barriers of convention and…fracture (sic) the religious perceptions of the participants.” They would shock people out of their ordinary conceptions and deepen religious experience by introducing a necessary sense of chaos to ritual. Heyokas served a similar purpose, but in everyday life. They were “contraries,” people who deliberately did “the opposite of the expected.” On hot days they wore the warmest clothes, and on cold days they went naked. They walked and rode horses backwards. They sometimes wore the clothing of the opposite gender. Their actions and choices exposed the dualities that are present within day to day existence.
John the Baptist clowned in a similar way. He wasn’t much of a prophet, since his predictions didn’t come true. He spoke of winnowing forks and divisions, and claimed that the Messiah would burn “the chaff” away in an unquenchable fire. Yet Jesus, in his ministry, spent most of his time among those who might be considered “chaff,” his society’s unloved and unwanted. His life on earth didn’t end with a grand and dramatic threshing, and for two thousand years some churches have spent a lot of time wondering why all the people they don’t like are still allowed to live in the world. They want the threshing and divisions, but Christ seems very reluctant to get around to winnowing people. Yet if the Baptist wasn’t a prophet, then what was he?
If we accept him as a clown, we can name him as a stranger rather than a prophet. He isn’t there in the story to make profound predictions. He’s there to make things weird.
In a wonderful passage, Charleston speaks of John’s embodiment of the “chaos of God:”
(The chaos of God) is earthly, seminal, disruptive, and energetic. It weaves through a more stately ceremonial of evolution, like strands of DNA, holding life together, but always capable of producing the unexpected. Sacred clowns are the electric energy that arises when order meets chaos. They are spiritual synapses, firing off the creative power between life and death. They stand in exactly the same place John the Baptist occupies by the banks of the Jordan, with one foot in life and the other in destruction. John’s call to repentance is more than a call to change. It is a call to face the reality of existence, the exact point where to be and not to be meet.
John is a liminal figure, standing on the border of the possible. He creates a contrast with Christ. As Charleston puts it, John “paint(s) the background so the figure in the foreground may stand out even more clearly.” This is what strangers and strangeness always do. With their strangeness, they bring the expected into high relief. Because of their chaos, we come to understand the ways we order our life. It’s part of why the church tolerated and even celebrated people like Christina the Astonishing and Simeon Stylites. Every group and society needs a critique of their idea of order.
An argument could be made that Jesus, also, is very strange. Those who opposed him found him chaotic. He came to disrupt the corrupt and indecent orderliness of his time. He works to disrupt the unjust and venal orderliness of our time. John doesn’t quite describe Jesus’s strangeness correctly, but he is right to claim that Jesus is strange. Christ’s strangeness has more to do with embracing rejected people than it does with the winnowing fork and the unquenchable fire. But, as the Gospel story will go on to prove, both kinds of strangeness are dangerous to the authorities.
Both John and Jesus had mothers, and Luke spends a good amount of time on these mothers in the first few chapters of his Gospel. Later poetry and song will go much further in elaborating on Mary’s life, describing moments when she celebrates and mourns for her son. I wanted to do the same for Elizabeth. In my poem, I present her as someone who sees and understands her son, and the role he will play. In the last line, I hope that her grief is clear as well. It is part of the grief of all parents, but amplified. All parents know that our children will come to live inner and outer lives that have little to do with us. We will become at least a little bit estranged through no fault of our own, and no fault of our children. Can we see past this grief to the great revelations that our children’s strangenesses offer to us? Can we celebrate the ways that they reveal the contrasts and dualities of our lives?
KPB Stevens 