Christ plays in ten thousand places

March 23, 2013 ~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

It’s a week early to be thinking about Easter, but I created this poster for our campus ministry to use during the Easter season, and thought I’d share it now. I’m using the faces of friends and loved ones in these images, sometimes, as in this one, standing in for the figure of Christ. But I think that Gerard Manley Hopkins gives me permission, in these last lines from “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”:

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace; that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is –
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

At the Memorial Service

March 21, 2013April 9, 2013 ~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Last night I went to a memorial service at the Newman Center, for Brittany and Courtney, two students who died in a car wreck on their way back to campus at the end of Spring Break. The Newman Center is a very modern church building, with big abstract stained glass windows and a large video screen positioned above the band. I sat towards the back and watched a slide show of the girls’ lives while waiting for the service to begin. The room was full, and people shifted in their chairs, had murmured conversations, tilted their heads up towards the screen. Music was playing from the speakers in the center of the sanctuary, and the songs that the kids who put the slide show together had chosen were cheerful. They played Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds,” a song I love, and while an old, stiff part of my soul wondered about it’s appropriateness, I found myself surrendering to it, to the sentiment it expresses. Every little thing will be all right, even in the face of death.

The priest continued that theme once the service began. He lit the Paschal candle and talked about its meaning, a symbol of new life in baptism, a symbol of continued life at burial. A visual reminder of the hope of the resurrection. I was aware that not everyone in the room was a Christian. My life as a college chaplain has been about meeting the spiritual needs of a wide variety of people who are at different places in their lives of faith, or living lives entirely without faith. But I was glad that the priest took time to explain the meaning of the ritual. I think that everyone, believers and unbelievers alike, can accept an authentic ritual, and that sincerity of belief is more welcoming than attempts to hide it.

These assumptions were challenged, however, when the priest offered the mike to the people there, inviting them to memorialize Brittany and Courtney. The first person to get up was a girl who had known one of the students, and the first part of her talk was a true memorial, a list of memories that honored the dead. But then she began to preach. She said that she’d come to Christ in the last year, and that everyone should follow her lead if they wanted assurance of heaven. She said that her faith had “saved her from a gay lifestyle.” I cringed. And I felt sorry for her. This poor child was being taught that she was somehow unacceptable to God, and that God is not loving, but judgmental and cruel, always weighing our actions and all too willing to send us to hell. But she didn’t make me angry. This was how she was dealing with her grief, and people who are sorrowful cast about for certainties.

The next speaker made me angry. This was a tall young man, who had been sitting next to the first speaker. He got up and came forward and told us that he didn’t know either of the dead girls. He said that we couldn’t honestly know if they were in heaven and hell. They may have claimed to be Christian, and members of their Catholic and Methodist churches, but that didn’t mean they’d really “come to Christ.” Nor, in his mind, did it mean that Christ would have any inclination to save them. He threatened us. Come to Christ or you’ll go to hell.

Fortunately, the priest stopped him before he went any further. “This is about Courtney and Brittany,” he said. “This isn’t an altar call.” The young man returned to his seat. I watched him. He was obviously angry at having been stopped in the middle of his tirade. His friends tried to reassure him. The memorial service went on. Real friends of Courtney and Brittany got up. They talked about the specific truths of the girls’ lives, how Brittany was always singing, how Courtney’s smile could give solace at the end of a hard day. They honored the specificity of the girls’ lives, and I honored them for it.

This morning I woke up thinking about that tall, angry young man, and the girl who proceeded him. Did they think they were being loving? How is it that they could be so indifferent to grief, so hopelessly callous towards the wounded souls in the room, so ignorant of God’s true love for the world? I began wondering, and I wonder now, if they haven’t been abused in some way, at some point in their lives. Maybe they’ve chosen a form of Christianity with an abusive ethic because abuse is familiar to them, so familiar that it’s almost comfortable. Maybe they’ve been told that they, as individuals, don’t matter, and so they assume that individuals don’t matter to God. Maybe they’ve been taught to run away from the specificity of their own lives, and therefore can’t imagine that God would care that both Courtney and Brittany liked to wear bathrobes in the morning, that Courtney always made Brittany’s coffee, that they were kind and loving people, and full of joy.

My perfect church would be a community of people who supported each other in their lives with God, and didn’t try to control the direction in which anyone’s faith led them. A community of saints, that was concentrated on God’s love for the world, and therefore tried to imitate that love. Jesus tells us that God knows every hair on our heads. Because God loves us so much, the specificity of our hair matters. The specificity of our bodies matter. We matter to God, in all of our moments – at a bar, drinking coffee on the sofa in the morning, when we’re with our loved ones, whoever they may be. That’s how one remembers the dead. By trying to see them through God’s eyes, in all of their glorious and wonderful variety. The truer Christians were the friends who got up with no purpose other than to tell stories about Brittany and Courtney. Truer, because they acted more like Christ, whatever their faith may be.

Sketch of the Sacrifice of Isaac

March 7, 2013 ~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Here’s an image of the Sacrifice of Isaac, that I’ll possibly turn into something more imposing. It’s very derivative – it started just as a sketch of the same scene as depicted on the Klosterneuburg Altar, this magnificent piece of church art from the twelfth century that I learned about in my Art History class (taught by the wonderful Karl Whittington). I started sketching it, and then I thought about elongated reliefs on Romanesque lintels, and the hand of God that often appears in apse mosaics. So I incorporated these things into a kind of horrible jumble of medieval art. Still, I ended up being happy with the sketch, in particular the left eye of the goat face on the side of the altar.

Sketch of a poem, written at Procter Center while looking out the chapel window at the lake

February 28, 2013December 4, 2025 ~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Winter white on the moving water,
reflected not only from the snow,
but the trees, the day, the surrounding weeks –
the world is bleached.

My grandmother made everything clean.
She ate wall paper paste when a refugee
with two small children in tow,
and everywhere was trampled snow.
Later her hands always smelled of bleach,
her skin was tight, it shone,
looked breathed on and polished,
incomplete in dampened light –

not scarred, but something far beyond
my knowledge was reflected in her skin.

And now the cold lake, moving winter
that knows everything it knows,
water that goes and goes
within its own flat glaze,
the colors almost fade,
the tints lay rigid and subdued –
yet the world is too much,
too true.

Words, Science, and Religion

February 17, 2013April 11, 2013 ~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Rick Searle, on his blog Utopia and Dystopia recently posted on Giordono Bruno, burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic Church in 1600 for speculation about the possibility of there being a plurality of worlds. I liked Rick’s post a lot, and wrote this response:

Your piece made me think about how I use science in my religious life. But first, I have to object to the idea that “Religions are above all ethical and philosophical orientations towards life on a human scale.” That’s certainly part of religion, but I think at base religions are a response to the numinous. People have had, and still have, experiences that go beyond rational explanation, that go beyond science, even. They need some way to think and talk about those experiences, and they find their way to religions, not because they’re rejecting science and its claims, but because they find that religion provides the language for what they need to say. I, like you, decry the way that religions can become intolerant. I would describe that intolerance as a kind of xenophobia – we become so immersed in the language of our faith that any other language seems threatening, other, strange. But if we reject these other “languages,” our own starts to die. English is full of French words, is in fact a strange combination of latinate and Germanic languages. But that’s exactly why I think it’s so beautiful. To my mind, religion only increases its beauty by allowing scientific words and phrases (by which I mean concepts) to change it. When I think about science, I think about it religiously. That doesn’t mean that I try to ignore its truths and make it conform to any dogma. It means that I encounter science through the lens of my faith. I seek to understand the natural world because doing so helps me to understand God. Like a scientist who really believes in the scientific method, I know that my understanding of God is incomplete, that I am merely proposing hypotheses in an attempt to speak about a mystery that is far beyond my comprehension. Some of the hypotheses I propose will be proved wrong. Some will stand, at least during my lifetime. But a disproven hypotheses doesn’t mean that I’ll abandon the language of religion, or the work of trying to understand the numinous. For me, the idea of other planets, other worlds, even other dimensions, is a very welcome one. It excites me to think that there are other words, other concepts, through which I can think about God. But always with the knowledge that God is outside of my understanding. I think that Bruno’s theological mistake was in trying to apply the concepts of “finite” and “infinite” to the nature of God. “Since a single Jesus visiting an infinite number of earths one at a time would take an infinite amount of time, there must be an infinite number of Jesuses. Therefore, God must create an infinite number of Christs.” God wouldn’t need to create an infinite number of Christs if God is Christ (Christ, in Christian theology, is uncreated and existed before creation, as God). God is outside of time. A triune God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) who is outside of time can be on infinite worlds all at once, or play with time in any way that divinity can imagine. But here I am entering into Bruno’s mistake, claiming that my conception of infinity is applicable to God. The only way to move beyond speculation is to find other worlds, and to look for Christ on them.