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.

by KPB Stevens

We four climbed the mountain, and He was changed,
changed like the flaws made by freeze
and thaw as it cracks the walls of a church,
since change breaks all that we struggle to contain.
Change is raw, it weeps and seeps and breaks
the load-bearing law, and brings us, the remaining three,
to creep on painful knees. It is a riot, and the sorrow after,
flowers sprung from blood and cadaver,
and the innocent hung on crosses as the world comes undone.
The earth spins around the sun, gates and graves
open again, seasons change and stay the same.
I see it now, down on my knees – God will always
remain one, standing still, ever-flowing, never done,
and we will change from this moment, this revelation,
constant, and spinning, and gone again.

Illumination

On Saturday, we discovered that the ice had cracked the mosaic above the door of the church and sent the tesserae falling down. On Monday, I went to a rally, clergy gathering to defend the immigrants from Haiti who had been invited to a small Ohio town to help revive the economy and now might be told to leave again. We were asked to reflect on the change we’d like to see, and I found myself resisting the question. As my colleagues got up to answer, I stayed seated, not knowing if I could say what I really wanted to say. Which is that true change cannot be predicted. And that focusing on the future and trying to force it into our visions of what it might be is not an exercise in embracing change.

God refuses to be contained, even by our visions of the future. When Peter, James, and John went up on the mountain with Jesus, they were bewildered by change and desired to build a structure for it. But change sets itself against our structures. Laws, constitutions, contracts, agreements – these are all mechanisms for trying to evade change or, if it comes, manage it. Perhaps they’re necessary for human life. But as I sat among the clergy, I was of two minds. I wanted to embrace the efficacy of the law, the long, slow lope of managed change, and I wanted to see it overcome entirely. That is, after all, the story of our faith. Peter, James, and John will live through crucifixion and resurrection, and those two events will establish a great pattern of change that will repeat, like the seasons, throughout the centuries. And yet, even that pattern will be managed by the church that these three apostles help to establish. Christians will be told that the cycles of death and rebirth can be contained in creeds and rituals, and we will lose our sense of shock, our distress, our agonized need to find meaning in the incoherence of crucifixion and the ineffable nature of resurrection. So we will come to this moment, where we cannot imagine the chaos of real change, and when we speak of it, we will only be able to evoke the patterns of the past.

As a priest, I love ritual and I can tolerate creed. But these things only point to the transfigured moment, when divinity reveals itself as constant and at the heart of things. My faith must move beyond its sheltered crouch at the heart of the spinning, that place at the core where the dizziness can be managed. Somehow I must bring myself to venture out to the edge of the vortex, where ideas collide and the potential for pain and hurt is ever-present. I can stay cowering in my church. But the cold of winter is breaking the walls. As if it wants to tell me that I must embrace my fear and go outside and seek the danger of the cross. Which is the danger of covenant. Of forever wanting to embrace God’s changeless love and forever wanting to face, bravely, the collapse of this current world.

The fish is in the sea  
and the sea is in the fish,  
so that every muscle,  
every organ, floats in brine.

I breathe in the chill,   
right air of the morning  
and oxygen binds into molecules,  
unites my body to the world.

Beloved, by what element  
does my soul gather in the divine?  
What part of my past, what hope,  
is made whole by mysteries

that expand everywhere   
and lay curled within me,   
beyond me,  
both of and not of the world?

Illumination

I was taught, as a priest, to value the intellect’s way of knowing. But there are other ways of knowing. The body knows in its own way. The emotions know — they laugh their knowing, they weep their knowing. If theology is the thoughts we think about God, we need other theos. Theophysicality. Theoemotionality.

I wrote this poem within a moment of bodily amazement. The atmosphere we move through is also within us, and our physical selves are merely membranes that air enters and pushes out from again. More than that, our matter binds itself to the air, so that we dissipate in our environment, just as our environment permeates to the deepest level of our being.

And God? If God pervades the atmosphere, is everywhere, than this permeability must be part of our relationship with the divine. How do we experience this? Maybe through memory. Maybe through hope. Those words seem inadequate. Some emotion, some sigh too deep for words, fills us and breathes out into the divine.

I see my reflection in the polished gold of my gift,
like a priest staring down into a chalice.
I shine from the side of the scrolled box,
and looking at myself is like looking at the sky,
at the part of me that lives above,
always close to the goodness of God,
always trying to choose, with me,
good thoughts, good words, good deeds.

I am, like all of us, a reflection,
a small encapsulation of my most full self,
sent here, like all of us, to journey, to love, to delight.
Above, I abide like a steward, keeping my eternal house.
Why bring a gift, why follow a star? What is it that I hope for?
To turn, always, away from hate,
from falsehood, deceit, chaos and decay.
I am not alone. My heavenly self walks through stars,
does what is good, thinks well, speaks a generous word.

We will come together at my death,
myself and my reflection in this gift.
We will be judged together on a bridge.
Let it be wide, and easy to cross.
Let my death be full of song.
I have brought my gift to a holy one.
I kneel with it. The echo of my face is lifted
into his holy mother’s arms.
She knows that I’ve sometimes been complicit
in the world’s harms. Still, like the maiden on the bridge,
she will lead me to the House of Song.

Illumination

It would happen to me every Sunday, if I looked. I would see my face reflected in the chalice as I hover over it, praying and memorializing the Last Supper. Myself, distorted in polished silver.

But would I see my whole self? I’ve been reading about Zoroastrianism, the religion of the Three Magi who follow the star to the manger in Bethlehem. Zoroastrians believe in “vertical dualism.” They believe that the cosmos is divided into two camps. The good camp, full of truth, order, kindness, and decency, is presided over by Ahura Mazda. The evil camp, full of falsehood, chaos, cruelty, and self-service, is presided over by Angra Mainyu. Human beings can choose which camp to belong to, and we do so by our daily actions, following Ahura Mazda by engaging in good thoughts, good words, and good deeds, or following Angra Mainyu by engaging in lies, slander, and cruel and self-serving acts. The great cosmic battle is fought every day through individual choices.

Zoroastrians conceive of the self as two separate but always connected entities, at least during our sojourn through this life. When we are born, we separate into the fravashi and the urvan. The fravashi remains in the heavens, while the urvan is sent into the mortal plane. Doug Metzger writes that this process is “like a space station dispatching a scouting craft to earth, reuniting with that craft some time later, and sharing information about what was discovered down on the planet.” This is not a punishment, or a fall. Creation is good and full of delights. The urvan get to sample these delights, and their sojourn here will be joyful as long as they remain aligned to Ahura Mazda and engage in good thoughts, good words, and good deeds.

The magi follow their star, and as they walk over the hills and through the valleys, as they cross the rivers and mountain ranges, they are engaging in good works. They are not spiritual wanderers looking for something to latch onto. They live and act within their own story world, and their actions reflect their beliefs, not ours. If the star is leading them to the baby Jesus, it is because they can understand his birth from within their own context.

For them, he is a  saoshyant, a divine herald of the day of judgment. Born of virgin mothers, saoshyants appear at different moments of history and stand beside Ahura Mazda in the battle against Angra Mainyu. The great cosmic battle ends when the saoshyant sacrifices a bull, ending the last judgment and ushering in the time of peace and beauty that will follow. For the magi, Jesus ends judgment, ends the strife and terror of our moral struggles. He is one of many saoshyants, but that doesn’t diminish his holiness or make the journey to visit him less important.

I have found much solace in this religious understanding, and it does no harm to my own deep Christian belief. Life can be very hard. St. Paul wrote that when we try to do good, evil lies close at hand. Our good thoughts, good words, and good deeds often go unnoticed or unappreciated. Or they are manipulated, and used for evil ends. Or they seem small and unimportant when the world is writhing in pain. I must be reminded that the smallest act of kindness, the rising of compassion within my mind, even when I’m angry, the saying of a word of comfort at a bleak moment, has cosmic value, is its own small defeat of evil.

It gives me solace to think of the self as multiple and good. For awhile now I’ve followed Walter Brueggeman in thinking of the self as a covenant of many personas. We all have playful selves, wounded selves, competitive selves, creative selves, hopeful selves, lamenting selves. We are multifaceted. A covenanted self, to borrow Brueggeman’s phrase, is a balancing act between these many facets. We act differently in different situations. We allow different selves to lead in different contexts. I have a sexual self and a church self, a counseling self and partying self. I live by a covenant in which the sexual self does not show up at church, the partying self does not show up when I’m at a death bed. Every facet of my personality needs an outlet, needs a moment to be in charge. I tend to my soul by going to a party or being intimate with my spouse, and by praying and celebrating at the altar, walking hospital hallways and giving last rites. All of it matters. There is no essential self or “authentic” self. There is only covenant.

Yet there is also, often, a feeling of homesickness. As if there are facets of who I am that simply are not present in this world. The Zoroastrian categories of fravashi and urvan help me to make sense of that homesickness. My heart is restless until I rest in God. There is great solace in allowing the thought that part of me already is at rest within the presence of the divine.

At the end of life, Zoroastrians believe that the fravashi and the urvan are reunited at the foot of the Chinvat Bridge, the bridge that leads into the afterlife. They begin to cross the bridge. If they have cultivated good thoughts, good words, and good deeds, the bridge will be wide and they will be met by a beautiful maiden who will lead them into the House of Song, where divinity waits to embrace them. My poem ends with Mary taking the role of the maiden. The magi who narrates my poem knows that he has, sometimes, failed, despite his best efforts. Yet as his gift is lifted into Mary’s arms, he finds his reassurance. He sees his face reflected in the gold of his gift. His fravashi and urvan anticipate their reunion. Such solace is worthy of any voyage, no matter how arduous.